Curses!
by Threepwillow
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Razputin Aquato is the only one his father can trust to break the curse on their family. Can he and Lili track down the last remaining Galochio before it's too late? :::RazxLili, background MillaxSasha::: NOW COMPLETE!
1. prologue

In the tiny Rocky Mountain Psychonautical Headquarters facility - wedged into a crack of the world somewhere, within a day's levitation of Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp but still a bit tricky to find if you weren't one hundred percent sure of what you were looking for - a typical afternoon went by rather slowly. You might find Howie Greissmeyer frantically trying to outbid someone in Canada over a limited-edition True Psychic Tales collectable tin lunchbox. You wouldn't be surprised to see that Noreen Pate was playing computer solitaire, or that Reggie Doom had fallen asleep altogether by the end of the work-day. And the office's youngest employee, probably the youngest employee of the entire organization, was typically steadfastly trying to break his paddle-ball record, with the toy levitating psychically a few inches in front of his face. Just because he was a full-fledged Psychonaut with three hectic, ridiculous field missions under his belt did _not_ put Razputin Aquato above cheating at mindless kids' games.

But three-fifteen this Friday - the last day of Whispering Rock's summer session before camp was over altogether - was _not_ a typical afternoon.

Noreen's office phone rang.

"RMPH, this is Agent Pate. Uh-huh....uh-huh....yeah let me write this down..."

Raz's office phone rang.

"Rocky Mountain Psychonauts, Razputin speakin' - Dad? Hey, what's so important that you're calling me at work?"

"Uh-huh..._what_?! _How_ much psytanium?"

Howie's cell phone rang.

"Hello? No, I'm sorry, you uh, have the wrong number...."

"The circus? _Here_? Yeah, of course I will!"

"You should probably send all of your telekinetics and maybe an astral projector or two - to clear up any issues you might have with non-psychics - "

Reggie's office phone rang.

"Agent Doom, RMPH. No, sir, I'm sorry, we stopped manufacturing those years ago..."

"Yeah, maybe! Camp just got out today, so...."

"No, there's no Howard Greissmeyer at this number. Please stop calling."

"Oh, well, I'm flattered. I'm no expert. No, really."

"Yes, you might try the New England branch, but they'd be the only ones that'd still have something outdated like that - "

"Okay, you too Dad. See you there!"

"Thank you."

"No problem, sir."

"Good luck.

"_Bye._"

All four of them hung up - but then Noreen's office phone began ringing again.

"RMPH, this is Agent P - oh, Rebecca, how many times have I told you not to call me here?"

Then Reggie's cell phone rang.

"Hello? Oh, hey sis, yeah, I know camp is over - "

"You could get in serious trouble with the agency, I'm not supposed to give out this number to non-psychics!"

Raz's office phone rang.

"Rocky Mountain Psychonauts - oh, hi Sasha. I mean, Agent Nein."

"No, you _can't_ go home with the Sweetwinds, I don't care if you and Chops are in love - "

"No, I never really went into her brain, I guess..."

"Hang on, Rebecca, I can't hear you, Agent Greissmeyer's phone is ringing - "

Howie's cell phone rang.

"Hello? Ma'am, you have the _wrong number_. This is not Howard Greissmeyer!"

"Because you're only asking _me_ because Mom and Dad said no!"

"Uh...with the turtle? I don't really know, Sasha..."

"No, listen, I promise I'll call you back when I leave the office - I love you too - "

"No, it's not, I swear! Now stop calling this number!"

"No, just stop asking. No. _No_, Elka. I don't care! Okay?"

"Yeah, hope you get that worked out."

"_Bye._"

All four of them hung up.

And then Raz's cell phone rang.

The other three agents popped up over the sides of their cubicles to glare at him, but Raz was so beyond caring, because this was no ordinary phone call. This was a call he'd been waiting for all day.

This was _Lili's_ ringtone.

He dove into his backpack for the phone, rummaging past a strange sort of pink candy, a vial of smelling salts, and a gross, molding piece of bacon stored in a plastic baggie. Old habits died hard. Meanwhile, apparently Raz wasn't the only one who recognized the ringing.

"Ooooh, it's his _girlfriend_," teased Noreen, sinking back down to her own desk.

"His girlfriend's got her own ringtone on his phone?" Reggie said with a snigger. "How very _whipped_ of you, Aquato."

"Hey, shut up. At least I _have_ a girlfriend." He found the phone and answered it as quickly as possible. "Lili?"

"_I DID IT!!!_" screamed the other end of the line. "Raz, I finally did it. I totally nailed Ford's invisibility test!"

Raz leapt to his feet, joining in her excitement, only to realize that his leg had fallen asleep where it had been propped up on his desk. He ended up catching himself awkwardly by levitating. "Lili, that's great!"

"I finally have all these stinking merit badges!" There was a pause, and Raz imagined her smiling confidently to herself. When it went on too long for her tastes she chastised him. "Well come on, Raz!"

"Sorry," he said honestly. "I'm just trying to come up with a way to say 'I'm so proud of you!' that doesn't sound like an overenthusiastic soccer mom."

"Dork," she said. "I guess that's fair."

"I'm also desperately trying to avoid gloating about how I got all _my_ merit badges _and_ got promoted to full Psychonaut over a roughly 36-hour period."

"Okay, _now_ you're just being a jerk!" said Lili, a sentiment that Noreen echoed (in fewer and less polite words) from the next cubicle over. "You better be planning to take me out somewhere to celebrate or I don't know if I'm gonna forgive you for that."

Raz paused again, and thought about it. His thoughts eventually looped back around to his earlier conversation with his father, and his face lit up even brighter.

"The circus is in town."


	2. Unimaginable

**Chapter 1: Unimaginable**

A date. A date. Raz was going on a date.

Why was this so strange to him? He'd been on dates before. And they'd all been with Lili, so it wasn't like he had to make a lasting first impression. What about this particular date was making him so..._tense_?

He looked at himself in the mirror. He tried to smooth out the twist in his bangs, but they stuck up, refusing to _quite_ lay even with the rest of his chin-length hair in the front. He tried to sneakily downplay this by wearing his goggles everywhere. Could he wear goggles on a date? Raz felt like a girl, but none of his clothes seemed right. Did he need to look nice, because it was a date? Was it better to be casual because they were going to the circus?

The circus. That was probably part of why Raz was freaking out so bad. He saw Lili off and on throughout the year. He saw his father off and on throughout the year. He saw them at the same time...never. They'd met once, but that was four years ago; he'd been stressed, and she'd been, well, ten. Neither one of _them_ had probably made a lasting first impression on each other. And almost immediately, all three of them had set off again.

Raz scowled, and the mirror scowled with him. The clock on his dresser indicated that he was running out of time to make a decision, so grabbing at his backpack, he just stuck with what he was wearing: his thick, dark green Psychonauts turtleneck (outrageously baggy on him - he'd gotten a good bit taller but no less scrawny, and he had to get a size too big just so it came down far enough on his torso), a beat-up pair of jeans with sizeable holes in the knees, his regular boots, and yes, the goggles. You never knew when you were going to need goggles for more than just stylish headgear. Lili would probably get a little snippy with the sweater, and make some jab about him continuing to rub his Psychonaut status in her face, but his dad always liked to see him wear it. Raz liked to think it made him proud, just a little.

He locked the door to his tiny two-room apartment in the RMPH facility behind him as he left, shouldered his backpack, and levitated up into the air, heading off in the general direction of the circus grounds that his father had pointed him toward, where he was going to meet up with Lili for his _date_.

Raz Aquato was going on a date.

But he was a psychic, and he had a really bad feeling about this.

-xxx-

As Raz descended back to the ground from over the spread of three vast, brightly-colored tents, he had to admit that there were less cool things his family could do for a living.

The main tent was red, white, and yellow stripes, a beacon of circusiness that couldn't be ignored, even in the early-summer-evening light that was almost dusk, but not quite. The smaller sky blue tent for the pony rides and dark green one for the refreshments and carnival games sat on either side of it. Raz could smell popcorn, snow cones, and elephants. He could hear the shouts of kids and the whining of an accordion. The closer he got to the ground, the more details he could pick out among the crowds: the huge pens for the elephants and tigers, the messy train of caravan wagons that hid themselves neatly behind the tents, the cotton-candy vendor who'd given him his first comic book - and there, standing by the entrance to the main tent, as much a contradiction as always in a floppy pink dress and black-and-white striped tights, trying not to fidget, was Lili.

He landed behind her and clapped his hands over her eyes, grinning.

"You big dork, you act like I'd actually have to guess. I _am_ a psychic you know."

"I know," he teased. "But now I've totally messed up your makeup."

She gasped, then growled a little in irritation, and he circled around to face her, laughing. "That's not funny, Raz!"

"Sure it is," he said. "Now you'll just have to take it off. And that is exactly how I like you." He smiled again, genuinely this time, and tried not to laugh again as he felt the gears in her mind struggle with whether or not she could stay mad at him.

"I'm gonna wipe it on your dumb sweater," she said finally, but she didn't. She just pulled a tissue and a small mirror out of her purse and tried to make the best of it.

Rummaging in her bag made Raz notice it. "Hey, lemme see!" He put a hand on her shoulder, tugging the strap of her purse away from her body a little, and he ran his finger down each and every Whispering Rock merit badge, all in a neat row. Once he got to the bottom, he traced back up to the bluish-green one for invisibility, lingering there.

"Yeah, _finally_," Lili said after a minute. "Milla said she thinks the reason it took me so long is that I'm so 'confident' or 'bold' or whatever. And that that makes it harder for me to...disappear."

"Y'know, that makes a lot of sense," said Raz, using the strap to tug her closer. He hooked a skinny arm around her shoulders and guided her along with him, toward the entrance to the red, white and yellow tent. "Now c'mon, I hear the drums, and that means it's about to start!"

The two of them walked side by side across the circus grounds, getting swept into the stream of people that were all trying to funnel into the opening in the tent. When they reached the entrance a tall, heavy woman scowled down at them, asking for tickets, but Raz just smiled up at her from underneath his goggles, and once she recognized him she waved them through. He and Lili squirmed through the crowded aisles until they reached the edge of the stage, then headed around the ring to the right until they found a couple of empty seats in the front row.

"It's really loud!" Lili tried to shout, over the din of the crowd and the big top band.

_Good thing I don't need to hear your voice, then,_ Raz thought at her, and she rolled her eyes, but she smiled.

Suddenly, the main lights went down in the tent, and the stage lights shone brighter, particularly one spot that pointed down at a short, round man in an insanely tall stovepipe hat. Raz assumed he was the ringmaster, but he didn't recognize him; he and his pinstripes must be new. Sure enough, a microphone dropped down from the darkened canopy of the tent, bounced off his tall hat, and landed right in his outstretched hand, and he began to introduce the performance in a reedy old-man voice that didn't match his rotund figure.

"Gentlemen, ladies, boys, girls, _everyone_," he began, gesturing grandly in a vague circle around himself, "please allow me to put before you, in yet another one of their remarkable performances of daring feats and fantastical displays, the F-Z-A Cirque Extraordinaire!"

"We're the 'A,'" Raz murmured to Lili. "The Fs are the clowns and the Zs are the animal act."

"Some of the things you will see here tonight are things that you have never seen before, and things that you may never see again! Prepare to be shocked, wowed, and amazed by the magnificent things that will occur in this ring!"

Raz rolled his eyes and slouched down into his seat a little further, gangly legs extending out into the empty space in front of them. "Yeah, yeah, we know," he said to himself. "All ringmaster babble sounds the same."

"Shh!" said Lili, not even looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on the man in front of them in rapt attention. Her legs had curled up under her chair a little and she wasn't blinking much.

That's when it hit him: Lili had never been to a circus before.

Smiling faintly to himself, Raz stopped making his little side comments, and tried to bring himself to care about everything the ringmaster was saying before the Farradays, the clown family, wheeled out in their tiny orange car and started going to town. Every time Raz came back to the circus, there seemed to be more of them, but their little car never got any bigger. Eight garishly dressed and face-painted clowns poured out of the vehicle, along with any crazed number of creme pies, squirting bottles and flowers, pogo sticks, colorful silk scarves, air horns, and absolutely anything you could juggle. The bowling ball was new. Raz gave into the infectious laughter and found himself giggling at things that weren't even funny any more after he'd seen them so many times. Lili, in the seat next to him, remained totally transfixed.

"Hey, Lili? They're clowns," he said, poking her in the side. "You're supposed to laugh."

"Oh my god, shut up!" said Lili, swatting his hand away. But at least he'd gotten her to say something, and hopefully she'd snap out of it soon.

By the time all eight Farradays were in a state of comical disarray, and the oldest daughter had managed to spin eighty-five hula hoops at once (not a world record, but pretty impressive nonetheless), the popcorn vendor - a handsome, if chubby gentleman by the name of Otto - had looped around past them. Raz waved him over and was handed a small box of it free of charge. Almost mechanically, Lili reached into it and withdrew a handful without a word. The acts in the ring still had her memorized - because by now, the Zotzkys and their parade of animals had come snaking into the tent. The women of the family were up front, guiding or riding on the huge African elephants. Some of them even spun around and danced on the animals' backs, sequined outfits shimmering in the spotlights. Behind them came the family's men and the four glossy tigers.

"_Tigers_?" Lili gasped, eyes going impossibly wider. "Real tigers?"

"This is a circus, Lili," Raz said, but if she heard him she didn't let on.

Carl and Remy Zotzky coached the tigers across beams and through hoops. They had them standing on their hind legs and doing somersaults. In Raz's slack hand, the popcorn box was almost empty, and he hadn't eaten much of it himself. But by then, even Raz was getting absorbed into the performance, no matter how many times he had seen it before.

Because soon, his family was coming out.

As the tigers danced out of the ring, the round little ringmaster proudly announced the Aquato Family Flyers, and unless Raz was imagining it, Lili's hypnotized eyes started to shine a little bit brighter. Soon a lone figure was taking his place in the center of the ring: Raz's oldest brother, Finn.

Raz knew this act backwards and forwards. The theme of it was the hours in the day. Finn, to start off with, represented daybreak. His whole part of it was floor and trampoline stunts, lots of it just as slow and majestic as any sunrise. He moved with the rolling, lumbering grace of a bear, doing too many handsprings in a row to count, balancing perfectly on the tips of one hand's fingers, jumping higher off solid ground than a regular person should be able to. When he finally took to the trampoline, he got crazy amounts of air - and applause.

With one final trampoline leap, he was snatched up by the wrists and tossed off into the depths of the back of the tent (there was a net there, Raz knew, but it looked pretty impressive for him to just disappear like that) by Adrian, one of the twins that were the next youngest after Raz himself. Adrian, in his bright blue costume, and Dimitri in bright green, represented midday. They flew across the arena raucously on their trapezes, flipping and spinning in a way that looked almost careless, like they knew nothing would happen to them at all. Their mischievous natures were not at all concealed in their performance, and at least once they threw brightly colored confetti into the audience. (Raz couldn't help but notice that a yellow square of paper got stuck in Lili's hair in a way that was really cute.) They really did look like dragonflies flitting around in the bright sun on a hot summer's day.

Soon, though, they too vanished from the ring, and Raz's oldest sibling and only sister, Calliope, appeared on the tightrope to indicate dusk. Her dress was a soft, flowing twilight purple, swirled through with sunset pink and orange and speckled with little white beads that seemed to light up like stars. If they weren't so...genetically related, Raz would probably have been less hesitant to admit that Cal was pretty much gorgeous. She danced across the tightrope with almost frightening grace and ease - like any prima ballerina would on the ground, but almost fifty feet up instead, and on the thinnest of wires. Even some of the squalling children in the audience fell silent with awe, and Lili next to him was almost paralyzed.

As Cal danced, the lights in the big top started to dim, but she kept swirling across, even as it became harder and harder to see. When she finally dismounted she was just barely visible, and only by the light reflecting off her beaded outfit. Raz applauded with the rest of them, but inside, he was almost glad that her part of the act was over, because now that the ring was pitch-black, it was "midnight" - and time for his father's fire-wielding routine, back on the ground, where the flames of his torches and poi would be adequate to light everything up. He was positively grinning as Cal reached the ground again.

And then, right before Raz's eyes, the lights came back up, and the fat ringmaster was back on the stage, announcing the performance's end.

The crowd gave a standing ovation - not least of all Lili, who had leapt to her feet and was applauding furiously, shouting her amazement at absolutely everything. The only person who remained seated was Raz himself, utterly dumbfounded.

Where was his father?

He stayed frozen there even as people started to mill out of the tent.

"Oh my _god_, Raz, why didn't you tell me it was going to be so amazing?" Lili gushed, waving her arms for emphasis. "Those guys, with the tigers - and that one clown, the really tall one with the green nose? Oh my _god_. And your sister, she's _beautiful_! What kinda genes did she get, because - hey, what's up?"

"My dad," Raz finally croaked. "My dad wasn't there."

"Oh," said Lili. "Yeah, I was wondering if he was going to show up. I guess not, though, sorry. Maybe he just wasn't in this one."

"No," said Raz, regaining his voice. "My dad's in every show. It was really obvious that his part of the act was missing - well, to me anyway..."

"Huh. Well maybe he's not feeling good, or something."

"_No_," he said more forcefully. "You're not getting this, Lili. My dad is in _every show_. Even when he's sick, or if he pulls something doing his contortionist stuff, my dad pushes himself through the act. He's never missed a performance."

The severity was starting to sink in with Lili. "Never?"

"_Never_."

"...Something's going on, isn't it?" she asked him, but it wasn't really a question.

"Yeah," said Raz. "Something is seriously going on."


	3. Uncharted

(**A/N:** My apologies for the infodump! I swear the next chapter is more actiony goodness. Thanks for reading so, uh, promptly!)

**CHAPTER 2: Uncharted**

Tugging Lili after him, her hand in his, Raz darted through the crowds. Except while all of them were milling out of the big top, Raz was pressing further inward, trying to go out the back way and around to his family's caravan.

He'd known something was wrong. His dad would have called his cell phone for something like this, if all he wanted was to invite him down to the circus. He called him at work because he wanted to make _absolutely sure_ that he'd get him on the phone. And ever since that call yesterday, Raz had felt off about something, especially right before he left. He was starting to feel glad that he'd worn the goggles after all. Who knew what he'd be getting into next?

"This isn't working," said Lili from behind him, as they struggled against the flow of human traffic.

"You're right," he agreed, and the two of them made use of their levitation skills and bounced over the heads of the crowd, till they could get to the back of the mass and then through the tent flap and out into fresh air again. Raz darted toward the caravan wagon at the back of the line and Lili continued to follow behind him. He didn't even bother to knock.

Inside, it wasn't like his mental world at all. It was cramped and stuffy, and it smelled like Calliope's gypsy incense. His four siblings were crowding around what was really a three-person mirror, trying to wipe off facepaint and find their own faces underneath again. They didn't appear to have heard him come in, so Raz announced himself rather loudly. "_Where's Dad?_?"

All four turned to look at him, then glanced around at each other. Eventually, with what seemed like reluctance, Calliope stepped forward to talk to him. She had only peeled off one set of her fake eyelashes, so her blinking was lopsided as she crossed toward the door.

"Father...left," she said in her soft voice. "Late last night, after all of us had gone to sleep. He didn't tell any of us he was going."

"Where the heck did he go?" asked Raz, his desperation beginning to calm down into more long-term confusion. "What would make him leave so suddenly, _and_ miss a show like this?"

"We dunno," Finn admitted from over by the mirror.

"We were hoping that...you did," Cal added.

"Me?" Raz wondered. "But how the heck should I know?"

"Well," said Cal, "you're the one he left the note for."

From the shelf next to her bedcot, Calliope withdrew a sealed yellow envelope and gave it to Raz. He turned it over slowly in his hands, reading his name in thin letters on the front: _Razputin_. It was definitely his father's handwriting.

"Open it!" hissed Lili from behind him. So Raz slipped a finger under the edge of the flap, and tugged it open. The letter inside was the full front of a page, and some of the back. With Lili following along over his shoulder, Raz read it to himself.

_Razputin,_

By now you've probably realized that I didn't just invite you to the circus to spend some time with my youngest son. The phone call you received yesterday was the most I could do with other people listening. I don't know whom I can trust right now. (By that token: if you are reading this letter aloud, please stop, no matter how safe you think your company is.)

Raz swallowed rather hard at this. Even his own brothers and sister?

_You are probably familiar with the fact that I keep a secret formula for the composition of all my torches, for my fire routine. You probably also know that this formula has been passed down through the circus-performing Aquatos for three generations before me, and that it has never been shared with anyone outside the family. Yesterday morning, I was accessing this formula's hiding place only to discover that it had been stolen._

It was easy for me to discover who was currently in possession of the formula - he vanished, fleeing the circus, before I could catch him with my psychic abilities. He perhaps at least wanted to get a head start. But more important is this: no one outside of the five of us would ever have had access to this hiding place. The man who acquired this formula must have gotten it from one of your siblings.

At this, Raz paled. He couldn't believe that any of them - not even the rebellious Adrian and Dimitri - would have betrayed his father like this! The circus was the man's entire life. With this formula gone, free to be duplicated, any other fire routine in any other circus could put him out of business - but worse than that, it would be a blow to his father's pride.

_I don't need you to pursue the thief - I have taken this responsibility upon myself. And I don't want you sleuthing around in your family's heads, because our entire act will fail unless all of us have absolute trust in one another. No one must know except for the two of us, and the one who is guilty. I will deal with all of this myself as well._

What I do need from you, Razputin, is to find Kasper Galochio.

"Wait, _what_?" Raz wondered aloud. Frantically, he continued reading.

_The man who has stolen my formula has been with the circus for many years. He knows about our curse, and the way our entire family is doomed to die in water. As such, he has fled from me by heading out to sea. If I am to reclaim my formula, I have no choice but to follow him. By the time you are reading this, I will already have done so._

Razputin, you are the only one of my children to inherit my capacity for psychic abilities. In addition, you are the only one of my children that I can trust at this time, because I know it was not you who stole my formula. If I am to survive this, and retrieve what is rightfully mine, our family's curse must be broken! And the only way for it to be broken is for you, my one psychic child, to track down the last surviving descendant of Petra Galochio, and make him remove it himself.

I know that you can do it, Razputin. And I know that you will.

The one clue I have to Kasper's whereabouts is a battered old street organ. You can find it in the cargo hold on the underside of the caravan. I know it will help you, but I don't know how. Good luck, and godspeed.

Augustus Aquato

Raz stood motionless by the door to his family's caravan. His four siblings were all staring expectantly at him, and after folding and replacing the letter, he looked back at them. Not one of them showed a sign of having any idea what was going on. Which one of them could it be? Was it Finn, who was toweling off his sweating hair? Adrian or Dimitri, the two of them still fighting over the mirror? Or could it possibly even be kind, beautiful Calliope, who looked even more worried than Raz himself was?

"Well? What does it say?" Cal asked him.

Raz didn't answer. He turned to look at Lili, and she nodded once, a fierce look on her face. Without a word, the two of them stepped back out of the caravan wagon, and Raz walked around to the place where the cargo rack opened.

"Raz? What are you doing?" said Cal, following him. "What does the letter say?" But Raz remained completely silent as he opened it up and tugged out the street organ, which had been lying on its side. He stood it upright and kind of stared at it.

"What do we do with it?" Lili wondered.

"It's too big to bring with us..." said Raz. "Maybe there's some music in it."

"What is going _on_, Raz?" Cal asked again.

"Look, it's nothing, okay?" Lili finally snapped at her. "Why don't you just go back inside and mind your own business? Geez, are you always this nosy?"

Calliope's eyes hardened as she looked at Lili, but she retreated back into the caravan without saying anything more.

"Wow, Lili," said Raz.

"Sorry, but she's not _my_ sister. I can afford to be a jerk. And we can't have her just looking on if she might be the one that did this."

"Yeah, I know, it's just...you're really gung-ho about this, aren't you?"

"Hey, y'know, this time it's _your_ dad?" said Lili. "Last time it was mine."

Raz turned away from the street organ to face her full-on. She had a very determined fire in her eyes, a huge contrast from her utter hypnotism during the circus performance. As usual, Raz was amazed at the way she could bounce back and forth so quickly and still throw the whole of herself into everything. And of course, he remembered when her dad had been kidnapped four years ago, right about the same time of year, and everything they'd been through together trying to get him back. He should have known she'd go all-out to do anything that resembled returning the favor.

Even in the light of everything else that had been happening, it kind of made him smile, and Raz reached out for her shoulder and tugged her toward him, kissing her once on the forehead and then, after a bit of consideration, kissing her again on the lips.

"Come on," he said. "Let's figure this thing out."

Raz walked around the street organ in a circle, trying to find the place where the music fed in, but it was hard to see from the outside. So, tentatively, he pushed against the organ's crank, and a single note played. He started cranking it in earnest and a strange tune floated out of the instrument, harsh-sounding and simple but oddly melodic. It wasn't familiar to Raz at all.

"What song is this?" he wondered as he kept turning the handle, hoping that hearing more of the song would register something with him.

"I don't recognize it at all," said Lili. "Do you think your family would?"

"Do you think we could ask them without sounding even more suspicious?" he countered.

"You've got a point."

But in the caravan in front of theirs - the one belonging to the Zotzkys - a window suddenly opened, and Ruben Zotzky, the oldest man in the family, poked out his head.

"I haven't heard that song in years!" he cried. "Where on Earth did you find that?"

"My...my father gave it to me," Raz answered, hesitant.

"Well, your father's got some eclectic tastes, he does," said Ruben.

"What song is this, anyway?" Lili asked him.

"I don't quite remember the title...it was somethin' really vague, didn't really mean anything in relation to the music. But I like just about anything that fella wrote."

"And...who wrote it?" Raz pushed.

"Man by the name of Jeremiah Fields, if I'm not mistaken. Used to write all sortsa things for those street organs, was a big fan of the circus. I think he wrote that one for a big-time circus guy from the east, actually!"

Lili and Raz looked instantly at each other. "Galochio."

"Mighta been," said Ruben.

"Do you know where this Jeremiah Fields guy is?" Raz demanded eagerly.

"Probably livin' like a hermit, up in these mountains somewhere," he said. "Should be able to find him, if you look."

"Thank you very much, sir!" said Lili, smiling sweetly up at him, but she and Raz were already running from the fairground.

"_Big Top Banzai_!" Ruben cried after them. "It was somethin' like that!"

"Thank you!" Raz yelled back again. But the title of the song suddenly didn't seem quite as important as finding a phone book.

-xxx-

Nothing.

The phone book had given them nothing.

"We can't give up," Raz insisted, but his heart wasn't really in it.

"We've barely even started," Lili agreed, but she too was growing frustrated.

"Maybe he really is a hermit, and he just doesn't have a listed number."

"Or maybe that guy back at the circus was lying to us," said Lili. "You never know who else there is working for your dad's thief."

"But this is the only clue we have to go on!" said Raz. "If we can't glean something outta this, we're even more stuck than we would be!"

"What if we used clairvoyance on that street organ?"

"Tried it. All I got was visions of swinging around in a cage at a zoo somewhere."

Lili groaned. "Monkeys."

Raz sighed, slumping his chin into his hand. If neither of the two of them could come up with anything, what were they going to do? His father could be out at sea by now, and every moment that went by gave him another chance to drown. Suddenly his sweater was itchy against his skin. He felt like a failure - as a Psychonaut, and as a son.

"Hold on, mister. Stop that way-too-audible train of thought right in its tracks." Lili jabbed him in the elbow so his head slipped and collided with the table between them. "What the heck are you thinking, dummy? You can't possibly be thinking about giving up!"

"How are we supposed to find one guy in a little hut in this entire mountain range?" Raz whined. "It's hopeless."

"Okay, um, excuse me? When our training instructor and an evil psychopathic dentist were harvesting the brains of our fellow campers, and we were the only ones around to stop them, did we decide that was hopeless?"

"No," Raz admitted.

"And when a terrorist organization demanding psychic amnesty in a third-world country abducted my dad and took him halfway across the globe to their hideout in the middle of a jungle full of _psychic wasps_, did we decide _that_ was hopeless?" she continued, with appropriate illustrative hand gestures.

"Well, no."

"And when the factory that produces Milla's favorite perfume turned out to be run by an awful corporation that not only tests on animals but has published some seriously anti-psychic propaganda - "

"Wait, what?"

Lili's face flushed a little. "Well, okay, maybe you didn't come with us on that one. But the _point is_ - "

"I know what the point is," Raz interrupted. "I know. I'm just really on edge about this one, you know?" He looked away from her, staring off into space in the general vicinity of the useless phone book. "My dad could be dying, and it's someone in my family's fault no matter what happens. I...I don't want it to end up being my fault, too." He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, and rose from the table. "So I won't give up," he swore.

"No, you _won't_!" Lili agreed.

"I'm gonna figure this thing out!"

"Yeah!"

"Because I'm a - "

"Because you're a - "

" - _Psychonaut_!"

" - _good person_ - oh."

They looked uneasily at each other, having unexpectedly finished the sentence in two different ways. Then Lili glanced away, rubbing at her forearm. "Yeah, well, that too, I guess."

Raz quickly changed the subject. "Maybe we're coming at this from the wrong direction. What if we tried a map?"

"Do you really think a map of the area is gonna have a little tiny hermit house marked on it?"

"Maybe not, but there might be an old dirt road leading out to it, or something. It couldn't hurt."

"I guess.... Do you even have a map in here?"

"I think there's one in here..." Raz was rummaging in the drawer next to his refrigerator, where the phone book had come from. He rifled past a staff directory for the RMPH and a couple of Whispering Rock promotional pamphlets before he found it. "Ha! Got it."

"Lay it out, then," said Lili, and Raz crossed back to the table and unfolded the map across it. Soon both sets of eyes were scouring it up and down, trying to find anything that looked like a little tiny hermit house wedged down in the mountain range. There was a sticker, a red star, stuck on top of the place where the RMPH and Raz's apartment were, since they weren't supposed to be on the map; there was a coffee stain, left behind by Sasha, who'd given Raz the map in the first place. There was no small dirt road leading off to a lonely cabin.

At least, Raz didn't see one. Lili, meanwhile, had leapt back from the map with a cry of what sounded like victory.

"Where? Where is it?" Raz demanded, looking even more frantically than before.

"I can't believe it!" said Lili.

"Where's his house?"

"There's no _house_," Lili said. "But there's _this_."

She pointed with one black-polished nail at a small section of land tinted slightly green, with tiny blue letters across the middle that read _Jeremiah Fields_.

"But that's - "

"Not his real name," said Lili. "Whoever wrote that music must have used this place as a pseudonym."

"And if he's retired to the mountains to live the life of a hermit - "

"Then he probably went right back to the place that inspired his alias!"

"Well then what are we waiting for?"

They straightened back up, and Raz grabbed the map, and then once again they were off. They'd figured this out, and they were going to do this. They were going to find Jeremiah Fields, figure out where Kasper Galochio was, and break the Aquato family curse.

He was going to save his dad, just like he saved hers.

Because he was a Psychonaut.


	4. Unexpected

**CHAPTER 3: Unexpected**

"Hey Raz."

"Hm?"

"What's the scale on this map?"

The two of them had been levitating through the mountains for almost an hour, periodically checking the map to make sure they were headed the right direction. In that hour, however, the sun had been getting closer and closer to the horizon, and eventually they'd had to dig a penlight out of Lili's purse. Almost a whole day since his father had left in pursuit of the thief. Raz was trying his hardest not to think about it.

Instead he answered Lili's question. "It should be in the upper-lefthand corner."

"Yeah," said Lili, "see, that's what I was afraid of."

Uh-oh. "Why?"

"We'd better land."

He followed her descent to the ground and touched down right on the edge of a clearing in the woods. In front of them were some vaguely rolling hills, with trees here and there across them but nothing substantial.

"Why do I already not like the sounds of this?" Raz groaned, and when Lili shoved the map and the flashlight underneath his nose, he groaned some more.

"Yep. Here we are. Scenic Jeremiah Fields. A stretch of land that only goes on for, oh, about _ten miles in either direction_."

"What are we gonna do?"

"It's getting dark, and we're kind of on a time crunch," said Lili.

Raz took a deep breath and bit the bullet. "Maybe we should - "

"No!"

"What?"

"Don't say it," Lili insisted. Raz raised one eyebrow at her and she continued. "Basic horror movie logic: the person that suggests it in the first place is the person that ends up getting the most screwed over. If you don't actually _say_ it - "

"But you agree that we should?"

"Oh...I _guess_," said Lili, though she looked nervous. "I just - I mean, I don't want you to - we only have one flashlight!"

"I'll be _fine_," he assured her, answering her unspoken fears. He kicked at a toppled log that was sitting next to him on the ground, dislodging a thicker branch from its side, and then picked it up and concentrated firmly on the other end of it until it burst into flames. "Pyrokinesis is pretty much in my genes."

"If either of us finds this guy, we call each other," said Lili.

"Right," Raz agreed. "I'm gonna go east."

"I'll go kinda northwest then," she said.

"Right."

"Right."

But neither one of them moved for a moment or so. Raz stood looking at her, torch crackling in one hand, the other one fidgeting by his side. Lili tugged a little on her braid and clutched the map a little too hard. Their eye contact was tinged with just a little desperation.

They leaned in and kissed, and then took off in separate directions before either of them could take it back.

-xxx-

About twenty minutes later, the sun had set completely. Out in the middle of the civilization-less mountains, Raz's burning torch was pretty much the only light to be seen for as far as his eyes would go in the dark. Lili had taken the map, so for all he knew he could have wandered away from Jeremiah Fields and ended up in Jebidiah Swamp, or something. But he had yet to hit seriously thick forest, so he was at least assuming he was on the right track. He just tried to stay scanning either the horizon (or at least where he figured the horizon was) or the ground.

Every time he looked at the torch in his hand, he was reminded why they were in this mess.

His thoughts flashed to images of his father, out at sea on a tiny boat, his flexible form wrapped almost twice around the mast clinging for dear life. It was raining - storming, with thunder and lightning, of course, in his overactive imagination - and the vessel was getting tossed around in turquoise-grey waves that were twice its size. Any sail the boat might once have had was tattered and gone, and the hull was slowly filling up with water, and his father was soaked through to the bone, teeth chattering in the wet and cold...

Raz shook his head to clear it. There was no way that was happening. First of all, it was too tremendously cliché to ever happen in real life. And furthermore, if he started thinking like that, he'd never be able to focus on this mission. Milla was always telling him that the best defense in a psychic ordeal was to think positively. Otherwise you would just start to get paranoid and panic. No, the best way for him to make it through this was to -

"_Aooohh-ooooohhh_," howled a wolf somewhere that sounded way too close to his current location.

Okay, now Raz was panicking.

His pace picked up a little, as he traced the edge of Jeremiah Fields, scuffing through overgrown knee-high grass and occasionally having to hop over fallen logs or rotting tree stumps. His torch was still blazing brightly, nothing to worry about there, but every so often Raz swore he could hear rustling that wasn't caused by his own movement or by the wind. He was scared to even think it - and he'd certainly never say it out loud - but he was starting to wonder if he was being followed.

Raz froze suddenly and turned around, bringing the light of the torch along with him. But behind him there was nothing to see, except the squashed-down pathway of crumpled grass where he'd been walking, slowly righting itself. Re-orienting himself, and trying to stay positive, Raz turned and started heading slightly more northward. He had a lot of field to cover, and he wasn't going to get anything done if he started freaking out over -

"_Aooohh-ooooohhh_," came the wolf howl again, even closer than before.

"I'm not scared of you, _wolves_," Raz cried out, needing to hear his own voice. "I've handled telekinetic bears and cougars that could light me on fire, you guys are no big deal." And it was true, wasn't it? But if that were true, then why was this somehow much more frightening than running around Whispering Rock in the dark?

Nevertheless, he kept walking, and after a longer stretch of time with no wolf howls his jitters started to go away. He felt better that he was walking further away from the edge of the denser forest now, rather than hugging it on the outskirts of the field. He'd also reached an area where the grass wasn't quite so tall, and the rustling sounds couldn't be heard any more either. After maneuvering around a tall, free-standing tree, Raz stopped and turned around again. There wasn't anything there, of course, but he hadn't really been expecting anything. He chuckled a little to himself. This wasn't so much scarier than camp after all. Nothing to worry about.

He turned back around to keep walking and came face-to-face with...nothing. Except this was the kind of nothing that breathed hot, foul-smelling breath right into your eyes, and seemed to be making a noise somewhere between panting and growling.

"Oh," Raz said nervously, "right. _Invisible_ wolves. Awesome."

And then he turned tail and fled, screaming like a girl.

Though Raz couldn't see it, the wolf's presence was obvious at his back, and there was no way he was going to outrun it. He drew out his levitation ball and tried to roll away, but it was still keeping up with him - and if Raz knew anything about wolves, it was that he was going to tire a lot faster than they were. And that they traveled in packs, and he was probably about to run into at least two more.

He only had one other option, and that was provided he made it to the tree in time.

Closer...closer...closer..._yes_! Raz leapt as high as he could and swung neatly around the tree's lowest branch before vaulting himself up into it. Not a bad bit of acrobatics considering he was holding a torch in his teeth. He balanced precariously on the branch before darting up to the one above him. At the base of the tree, the wolves flickered in and out of sight, scraping at the bark trying to climb it. They'd probably manage that in a few minutes, too, so Raz had to think fast. But where could he go? He probably had it in him to jump and levitate to another tree, but his torch wasn't lighting up much beyond the vanishing wolves and their immediate vicinity. Think, Razputin, think!

"That's it!"

Instead of illuminating the wolves at the base of the tree, Raz turned around and shone his torch on the upper branches of his temporary safe spot, scanning for something, _anything_ that might connect him back to a bird. When his initial search yielded nothing, he climbed up to the next highest branch, but it was thinner, and probably the last one that would hold his weight. At the bottom of the tree, the nothingness that was the first wolf got about three feet up and then slipped, but he was obviously not giving up.

"Come on, come on...ha!" Finally, a lone owl feather lodged into the rough, crumbling bark at the top of the tree. Raz snatched at it desperately and performed the fastest clairvoyance he probably ever had, even on that mission up in Canada with the psychic spies. According to the owl, there was a tree about fifteen feet away that he could definitely make it to with a good levitating leap. Beyond that, another tree lay across a slightly bigger gap, and then he could make it to the forest line and just stay up in the branches.

Raz lined himself up and leapt blindly into the dark.

The solid center of a branch was suddenly beneath his feet, and a thick cluster of leaves was suddenly in his face. He windmilled his arms for balance before finding his tightrope-walker's footing and sliding inward toward the trunk of the tree. Below him, he heard the invisible wolves scuffling around in confusion. They obviously couldn't tell what he was doing.

He shifted around the tree to a branch that was pointing in the right direction to get him to the other tree, and then flung himself out into the air again. At the peak of his leap his levitation ball appeared in his hand, and he glided desperately toward the taller, thicker tree. When he landed on its outstretched branch, the limb gave and sagged with his weight. Frantically he clambered across it to a point where it was more solid. Twice he nearly fell.

After that, it was easier. The branches of the adjoining trees were close enough that he could swing through them like the little circus performer he used to be, stopping periodically to readjust the grip his teeth had on his foul-tasting, sappy torch. Soon enough, Raz couldn't hear the wolves beneath him any more. This time when he stopped, it was to breathe.

He leaned his back heavily against the tree trunk, sagging against it and panting with adrenaline. It almost made him want to laugh - pyrokinetic cougars and telekinetic bears, those crazy bugs in that third-world jungle that could kinda make time slow down, and now invisible wolves. How did all of his missions get him stuck in the places with the crazy psychic animals?

He huffed out a desperate laugh and reclined his head against the tree trunk, too, looking straight up.

And above him, high up in the tree, was a house.

-xxx-

Raz held up his torch, trying to get a better look at the underside of the house. When that didn't really help, he climbed up to a higher branch, then crept out to the very edge of what would support him, craning his neck.

Though it was bigger than any he had ever seen, the structure above him looked like an honest-to-god treehouse. There was a low-slung doorway that had a tattered, wafting curtain hanging in it in place of any real door, and a little steepled roof, and a couple of windows, and the whole thing sat on a relatively level platform that extended out past the sides of the house, giving it a sort of porch. Leading up to it from the ground - Raz groaned in frustration when he saw it - was a thick, solid rope ladder. That was a little embarrassing.

Nailed up on one side of the door was a small wooden plaque, barely distinguishable from the wood of the house itself by the light of Raz's fire. He had to climb up even closer to the house to read it: _F. Croshaw_.

It occurred to Raz that he didn't know the _real_ name of this supposed Mr. Jeremiah Fields, but that starting with this guy couldn't hurt.

He tried to act casual as he approached the treehouse balcony - moving slowly enough so as not to seem aggressive but noisily and naturally enough so as not to seem like he was sneaking. Not that it was really possible to nonchalantly knock on the door of a house that was eight or ten feet up in the air and didn't actually have a door to knock on, but damned if he wasn't going to try. He knocked on the little nameplate instead, and then, boldly, called out. "Hello?" There was no answer, and there were no lights on in the house. Raz, being Raz, therefore decided that it was a brilliant idea to just waltz on in. After all, there wasn't really a door.

Inside, his torch illuminated a shack of a house with a chair and table in one corner, a large icebox in another, and a bucket on a rope in a third. (The bucket smelled foul enough that Raz could pretty much guess what it was used for.) Three of the walls were rough and unfinished, and one of them had another open doorway set into it, probably leading off to a place for the mysterious Mr. Croshaw to sleep.

The fourth wall was completely plastered, in an almost wallpaper-like fashion, with old sheet music.

Curious, Raz stepped slowly closer, making sure not to get his torch close enough to the wall to catch it on fire. Regular sheet music with heavy, black ledger lines was mixed in with huge long music rolls, a couple of which spanned the entirety of the wall, overlapping here and there with others. At first Raz was expecting to see bits of the wall through the holes in the music rolls, but the closer he got, the more he realized that the paper stuck to this wall was quite a few layers thick.

"Whoa," he commented.

Suddenly, a voice cried out from the smaller room. "Who's there?"

Confused, as the voice seemed to belong to a woman, Raz called out with the only name he had. "Mr. Croshaw?"

"Is that you, Jerry?"

"No, my name is Raz, I'm looking for..."

The sentence died on his lips, because the woman had stepped out of the room and was heading straight toward him. Her skin was pale and puffy, like someone who had drowned, and her salt-and-pepper hair stuck out from her head in a huge nest of tangled curls. She was wearing a dress that at one point had probably been bright chartreuse and clinging to her chest what looked like a teddy bear dressed as a ballerina.

"Jerry!" she cried. "Oh merciful heavens, I thought I'd never see you again!"

"Ma'am, my name isn't Jerry," he said again. "I'm Agent Razputin Aquato - "

"You are in so much trouble, young man! Disappearing like that, Granny's going to have to punish you - "

"Look, lady, I'm not your grandson! I'm here about a piece of music."

She stopped advancing toward him and blinked confusedly. "Music? It's been so long...."

"Yes, music. A particular song, something called...Big Top Banzai." He eyed her warily, and started using his talking-to-crazies voice. "Did you write that song?"

But suddenly, her expression shifted. "That song? _That_ song? What in the hell would you want with _that_ song? You're no grandson of mine!" She threw the toy bear at him and its tiara clanked against his goggles. Raz winced. "Get out, get out of my house!"

He gladly would have complied, but she was currently blocking his only exit. "I said get out, or I'll wring your scrawny neck, you hellspawn!"

Raz tried to think. This woman was obviously nuts - but she also obviously knew something about the song, or she wouldn't have reacted so violently to its name. And the plan was that if he found out anything about the song, he was supposed to call Lili.

But he didn't really have time to do much talking, because the crazy lady's small, pudgy hands were getting dangerously close to his throat, and when he dug down into his backpack, his hand closed around the psycho-portal before it found the cell phone.

Two seconds later, the goggles were down across his eyes, and he was inside.


	5. Unspoken

**CHAPTER 4: Unspoken**

Raz landed hard on wet stone, pain jolting through the heels of his hands and his knees where the holes in his jeans exposed them. With a groan, he stood up, checking himself to make sure everything was where it should be. Then he began to survey his surroundings.

This woman's mental world was overcast and drizzling, rain just heavy enough that things were wet but still too light to really be _rain_. It made everything pretty disgusting. If Raz tried to stare too far off into the distance, everything went black - kind of like his own mental world beyond the exterior of the caravan. The woman was clearly pretty self-contained into the area where he was right now.

The stone he had landed on was a long, winding pathway, leaning up the side of a hill. Seeing nothing better to do, he followed it, beginning to shiver as the wet and cold penetrated through his astral form. Funny how that worked. When he reached the top, Raz found himself in a small courtyard or town square of some kind, bordered on all sides by four nearly identical little cottages. The houses were the only bright spots on the dreary landscape - each one had a different-colored door, in yellow, green, blue, and a deep purple. In the center of the square was a tall clock tower, built from the same stone as the path and the square itself. It seemed to be functioning like a normal clock, but it didn't have any numbers on it.

The chill of her mental atmosphere was making Raz's teeth chatter, and he was wondering if he might be able to go inside one of the colorful shacks to get out of the mist, when suddenly the clock on the tower reached...some bizarre time of day that didn't look like a regular time when a clock would chime at all. But it did start chiming - in the most cacophonous, eardrum-shattering way possible. All the notes clashed against one another horribly, and just when Raz thought his head was going to explode from the noise, it stopped, and the hands on the clock continued spinning.

"Weird," he muttered to himself. "Oh well." Deciding to ignore the clock for the time being, Raz walked up to the first house on his left, the one with the yellow door, and knocked. He had enough time to read the little wooden plaque to the right of the doorframe - "Ms. Cathy Carpenter" - before the door was answered, by a small mousy woman in a dress the same shade of yellow as the door. Like a canary.

"Excuse me, ma'am, I was just wondering if I could come in because it's so yucky outside," Raz asked, trying to look boyish and non-threatening. She said nothing, but moved aside and motioned him inward. He followed her in and found himself in a cozy yellow living room. The sofa looked comfortable, so when she indicated that he sit, he did. She sat across from him in a yellow armchair.

"Thank you," he said. "I'm Agent Raz Aquato with the Psychonauts. Are you Ms. Carpenter?"

The woman nodded, but did not speak.

"Whose mind is this? She didn't give me her name."

Ms. Carpenter still said nothing.

"Right, okay." He fell silent too, trying to understand what was going on with this strange mute woman and her incredibly yellow house. He looked around the living room - sofa, chair, coffee table with home-making magazines on it, a rabbit-eared TV -

The television took him by surprise. Though it was clearly on, images from an old black-and-white movie splashing across the screen, there was no sound coming from it. Raz didn't think it was supposed to be a silent movie, and combined with the silence of Ms. Carpenter, he was growing suspicious.

"Can you...talk?" he asked her. She didn't shake her head no, but she still didn't speak. Instead, she rose from the chair she was sitting in, reached into a cabinet under the TV, and drew out a case to some kind of musical instrument. She opened up the case and showed to Raz a faded clarinet. He looked at it, then back at the woman, and she shifted the case closer to him, as if it were somehow important.

Raz raised an eyebrow at her. "Well, thanks for your hospitality, ma'am, but there are some answers I really need, so I think I'll try the house next door. If you don't mind."

Ms. Carpenter hung her head, but then she nodded, and showed Raz back out into the cold.

"_Very_ weird," he said as he crossed to the next house, with the purple door. He was halfway there when the atonal clock tower chimed out again, causing him to pick up his pace and run at the purple house with his hands clamped over his ears. The sign on this door said "The Emersons." He knocked on it a little harder than he had the first door, and was answered by a harried-looking younger man in very round spectacles.

"Excuse me, sorry, I'm Raz, can I come in?" he asked. The little man nodded and let him in, where Raz was nearly bowled over by a small child being chased by an even smaller one, grabbing at a piece of paper he was holding. Following behind them was an irritated woman who was obviously their mother. She sighed as though this had been an ongoing process. But it was all done completely silently.

"Oh, so you guys can't talk, either," said Raz, beginning to grow frustrated. The older of the children chased past him again and Raz grabbed him at the waist to stop him. "Hey, watch it." The little boy pouted at him but didn't speak. The mother smiled at Raz, obviously thankful to put an end to the chase. She took the paper he was holding away from him and gave it back to the little girl before she could start crying.

Raz, always a little bit moved by bullied kids, leaned his hands on his knees to talk to her. "Did you draw a picture?" he asked her. "Lemme see."

She turned it outward to show him. It was a garbled crayon drawing, hard to make sense of, but the person in the picture had a dark purple-black squiggle of hair just like the little girl's mother did, and there was a blob of lavender that was clearly meant to be her dress. Next to her was a big swirling mass of a golder color, and written in huge little-kid scrawl at the bottom of the page were the words MOMMY'S EUPHONIUM. She had written her name, EVIE EMERSON, at the top-right.

"That's really neat!" said Raz, smiling and patting her on the head. He stood back up and smiled at the mother, too, who was taking the picture from little Evie and heading back into the kitchen. Raz followed her and watched her stick it to the fridge with a big magnet shaped like an eggplant - the same shade of purple as much of the house was.

"So what's up with that clock tower out there, anyway?" Raz asked offhandedly, thinking he might trick the woman into actually saying something. But she still remained silent, heading to the sink to wash some dishes. "Is there any way I'm gonna get you guys to talk?"

Mrs. Emerson paused, set down the plate she was washing, and dried off her hands with a purple towel that was hanging from the door to the refrigerator. Then she reached up into a cabinet over the sink and drew out a big musical instrument - not quite a tuba, but similar-looking, and vaguely reminiscent of the scribble on Evie's picture. A euphonium.

"Okay, and _what's_ with the instruments," Raz muttered. "Would I have any more luck at the green house?"

Mrs. Emerson said nothing, but Raz figured it couldn't hurt. He left the purple Emerson household and started heading for the green-doored cottage. On the way, he was once again subjected to the horrible clock tower bell.

Green-door, the house of Gil and Gretchen Gosling, was more of the same. The newlywed couple didn't speak, though they were about to sit down to a game of chess with one another, and when Raz tried to ask either of them about their muteness or the bizarre clock tower, the only answer he received was Gil pulling a battered guitar case out of his closet. By the time Raz had dealt with the blue-doored house - home of Bernie, his old dog Buttercup, and a finely-polished banjo - he was starting to get fed up with the combination of silence and noise.

"What the heck is going on here?" he screamed out Bernie's window at the big, ugly clock tower. He whirled around in frustration and accidentally smacked the banjo with an outstretched hand, striking a strange combination of notes from its strings. One of them lingered long after the others had faded, however - and the longer it sustained, the louder it got, until the entire house was positively resonating with it. It started to hurt Raz's ears almost as much as the clock tower did, standing in the middle of it like this, and it set old Buttercup to howling.

Wait - _howling_?

Raz turned frantically to the dog and her owner. "What did I do?" he demanded. "What did I do?"

"You played the right note!" said Bernie, a thick southern twang in his voice.

"What _was_ the right note?"

"Dunno," Bernie admitted. "But you musta did it! You're fixin' 'er! If you c'n jest get the right chord outta our little town, I think y' might fix Miss Fannie!"

"Fannie?" Raz shouted over the din of the banjo note. "Is that whose crazy head this is?" _Fannie_. Well, if it were the house of F. Croshaw, he guessed it could have been Fannie.

F. Her name started with F.

"_That's it!_" Raz cried, rushing out of Bernie's blue house and into the frigid village square. He headed back to Gil and Gretchen's house, letting himself in and running straight at the guitar. Bernie, blue, banjo, _B_! Gil, green, guitar, _G_! He tried to recall the one or two guitar lessons that Reggie Doom had tried to give him once, and tentatively plucked at one of the thin strings. It must have been right, because the whole house started to shake with it, and Gretchen regained her voice just in time to shout "Checkmate!"

He bolted from there and into the Emerson-eggplant-euphonium house. The little boy nearly tripped him, but he made it into the kitchen, and breathlessly asked the dishwashing mother, "How do I play that thing?"

Her face lit up instantly, and she tugged down the euphonium and showed him the proper fingering for the note. It took a few tries as Raz struggled with the mouthpiece, but eventually he blatted out an E, and it resonated through the little purple cottage at the same deafening volume. The only house left was canary-yellow Cathy Carpenter and her clarinet.

She was sitting meekly on her armchair, staring off into space in the general vicinity of her black-and-white movie. She looked somehow the most pitiful of them all, and Raz's smile when she looked hopefully up at him was genuine. Slowly, as if she couldn't believe it, she reached around his shoulders and put his fingers in the right places, then nodded at him to go ahead and do it.

Raz blew so hard it squeaked, but the note came out strong in the end, and her house began to shake. Hand in hand, the two of them left out of the yellow door and stood in the square. From the other houses, the other families had started to emerge too. Together, all ten of them stood around the tower, staring up at it. Raz bit his lip, nervous. Was his limited musical prowess really going to fix all of this?

The clock reached its unpredictable hour once more, and this time, when the bells rang out, the chords they played were melodious and bright. The families in the square started laughing and rejoicing, and overhead, the gray clouds rolled away to reveal the pale sunlight of early spring. When the final notes played out of the tower, something fell from it, and landed on the ground at Raz's feet. It was a strange little rag doll, with wide eyes and dark, dark red hair. Eerily, it looked a bit like Raz himself. Embroidered on its chest was a faintly green letter J.

"Jerry?" Raz barely had time to wonder, and then he was vanishing from the square and falling back into the real world. The sweet sounds of the clock tower and its little village were still echoing in his ears, soft and basic chords that nevertheless sounded pretty.

The first sound Raz heard when he was back in his own head was the resounding _smack!_ of Lili Zanotto hitting him across the face.

"Ow! What was that for?"

"What in the _hell_ do you think you're doing?"

"When did you get here?"

"You were supposed to call me if you found anything. We were supposed to handle this together. The point of us splitting up was only to cover more ground faster."

"Hey, she was going for my throat! I did what I had to to, y'know, _not die_!"

"Well _how the heck was I supposed to know that you weren't dead_?"

Raz looked up at her from where he sat slumped on the floor in the corner. Even in the very dim light that her flashlight provided - probably for the best, his torch had gone out ages ago - he could tell that a couple of tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes, despite all of her anger. The hand that wasn't holding the flashlight was clenched tensely at her side, and her hair was starting to fly out of its braid.

"There were _wolves_," she stammered, "and I tried to call you and you didn't answer - "

"Lili, calm down," he told her, standing up and reaching out to her. "I'm a Psychonaut, remember? I can handle myself."

"It just gets hard sometimes," said Lili, "not knowing where you are." She sniffled a little, and regained some of her earlier fury. "And if you're going to go around just jumping into the minds of random people whenever you feel like it - _I_ thought a Psychonaut was supposed to be more professional than that - "

"Oh, crap," Raz realized suddenly, "_Fannie_."

Behind Lili, the old woman was still standing slack-jawed, the psycho-portal swirling open on her forehead. As gingerly as he could, Raz reached over and pushed it shut, then snatched it from the air as it flew back toward him and stashed it in his backpack. As if suddenly realizing where she was, Fannie snapped her mouth shut and blinked, eyes darting around as she reoriented herself.

"Goodness gracious, who are you two? And what are you doing in here?"

"Fannie Croshaw?"

"Yes, that's me... Oh, _my_. If I didn't know better...why, you're the spitting image of my grandson, Jerry."

"Yes, ma'am, I know," Raz told her.

"Well how on Earth would you know a thing like that? Are you a psychic?"

It was Raz's turn to blink. "Well, yes, I am actually."

Fannie scowled, and shuffled over to her little table and chair, sighing almost as if defeated. "Well, I suppose you're here about that song."


	6. Unforgivable

(**AN**: Trying desperately to finish this before I have to go back to school! Wish me luck with that. If I don't manage, however, keep in mind that there might be kind of a big gap with no chapters – two or three weeks at the most, though, I swear. But hopefully I can make it!)

**CHAPTER 5: Unforgivable**

"Wait, how do you know _that_?" Raz asked her. "Are _you_ a psychic?"

"Oh, no," said Fannie, sifting through the papers on her table and trying to make some sense of them. "But I've met a fair few in my day, so I can sort of sniff 'em out." She turned back to the two of them and smiled. "Don't worry, boy, I can tell you're one of the good ones. What'd you say your name was?"

"Agent Raz Aquato," he said. "I'm with the Psychonauts. Are...um, forgive me for asking this, but weren't you kinda crazy?"

Fannie stopped moving, and slowly sat down in her one chair. "I suppose I was, yes," she said. "I'm indebted to you for fixing that, no doubt."

"Nah, it wasn't a big deal," said Raz.

"And I apologize for attacking you. You see, you really do look like my grandson."

"What happened to him?" Lili asked.

"A while ago..." said Fannie, but she paused. "No, it must have been more than a while. Who knows how long I've been up here, living in this tree? But at some point, many years ago, I was Jerry's only caretaker. Both of his parents died in an unfortunate accident, so he came to stay with me. I loved that child like I'd given birth to him myself - he was my only consolation, after having his mother taken away from me like that. I didn't have much, but I got by with writing my little ditties and selling them out to folks that liked them here and there. Jerry and I didn't need anyone but each other.

"I had written that song - Big Top Banzai, that's the one you're concerned with, am I right? - for a strange woman about my own age named Carla Galochio, she said for her family circus. She'd been having a hard time getting anyone to do anything for her, but I couldn't see anything wrong with her - other than the fact that she was a bit bizarre, but I chalked that up to her career - so I wrote it. It was apparently a big hit with her audiences, and she paid me quite well for it.

"Soon, though, I started hearing things about her business. How they exploited deformed and handicapped people, displaying them as freaks. How they mistreated their performing animals and overtrained their dancers and acrobats to the point of them being unhealthy. Everything about what they were doing was unorthodox and cruel."

"Yeah," said Raz, fixing the floor in front of him with a hard gaze. "I know about the Galochios."

"Naturally, I felt terrible that I had ever helped such awful people! So I contacted Carla, and told her that I'd prefer it if she stopped playing that song. I didn't want to be associated with people like that - and can you blame me? We argued something terrible over it, and in the end, I thought she'd agreed, but I still couldn't quite be sure.

"A week later, Jerry...vanished."

Lili gasped. "What? How?"

"I'm still not entirely sure. But I just know it had to do with those horrible circus psychics. Right after it happened, I...was pretty shaken up about it. In fact if I'm entirely honest I mostly went crazy. I don't remember much between then...and now. And I haven't seen Jerry since."

Raz and Lili were silent for a while. "That's...awful," Lili finally said.

"It is," said Fannie, "but...it's how things are. I guess in my heart I've always known that Jerry was never coming back. I just couldn't bring myself to believe it. But your little boyfriend here helped set me right again." She smiled over at the two of them. "Again, I thank you."

"Mrs. Croshaw, we've got a lot in common," Raz said to her. "You may not think there's anyone who could hate the Galochios more than you do, but you haven't met my family."

"Oh, I don't doubt it," she said. "They really are quite despicable people. I'm sure I'm far from the only one who's lost something to them."

"They took my grandfather," said Raz, "and my mother. They cursed my entire family."

"I am truly sorry," said Fannie.

"But now my dad's in danger, too," he said. "And the only clue he left me led me straight to you!"

"That song?"

"That song."

"You're the only person we know of that's had contact with the Galochios in the past ten years," said Lili. "If anyone knows where they are, it's going to be you."

"They're very hard to track down," Fannie agreed. "They moved around, as is to be expected from a performing family like they were. But they've been dying off, or so I've heard. Apparently they picked one too many fights with the wrong people."

"I'll say. My dad told me I needed to find Kasper."

"I must admit to you, I don't quite know where he is. But I could give you a general area."

Raz frowned, trying to be polite. "No offense, Mrs. Croshaw, but we don't really have time for a 'general area.' We need to track him down as soon as possible."

"Then what you're going to need, little mister Psychonaut, is a Moral Compass."

Raz pulled a face. "Well, ma'am, I kinda like to think I already have one of those - "

"Of course!" Lili interrupted. "That's exactly what we need. As long as you can point us in the right general direction, all we'd need is a Moral Compass!"

"Okay, what am I missing here?"

"It's an old-school psychogadget that people don't really use any more," said Lili. "They stopped making them because they were so hard to work, so they're really hard to find. Basically, if you've got a Moral Compass, it'll point in the direction of whatever you know in your heart is the _right_ way to go. The right thing to do."

"So if we got one of these, since I need to help my dad - "

"You could use it to find Kasper!"

"But where are we gonna get one if they're so hard to find?"

"I'm afraid I can't help you there," said Fannie.

"I'm pretty sure I saw one in Milla's office when I was up there talking to her about advanced levitation techniques last week..." said Lili, but she didn't seem too excited about it.

"Well then, there you go, dearies!" Fannie said. "You can just borrow it from your friend, right?"

"Wrong," said Raz, catching onto Lili's train of thought. "Even as a full-fledged Psychonaut, Milla can't get past my age when she's looking at me. And with you along, she'd _definitely_ never just hand it over. She'd insist this whole thing was too dangerous."

"Do you think Sasha might have one?" Lili wondered.

"I don't know," said Raz. "But he's our best bet. Even if he doesn't, he could probably swindle Milla out of hers. _He_ treats me like an adult."

"So I guess we're going back to Whispering Rock," said Lili. "I hope they're still around and they're not heading back to their actual homes yet."

"You are not going back _anywhere_ until you get some sleep!" Fannie insisted suddenly. "Can you two see yourselves?"

Raz looked over at Lili. The remnants of her earlier tears were still crusted around her eyes, and her hair was looking more and more frazzled by the minute. There was a heavy hang to her hands at her sides and her legs looked like they might give way at any second. She looked dead tired. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he probably looked just as horrible.

"But...my dad..." he protested weakly.

"Will never get saved if you keel over from exhaustion," Fannie insisted. "You two take my bed and get some rest. I doubt I'll be able to sleep at all until I've tidied this place up and worked a lot over in my head, so don't worry about putting me out. I'm sure your father will be fine."

"I guess I could use a little shuteye," said Lili.

"Yeah, she's got a point," Raz agreed.

"Go on, go on." Fannie shooed them into her bedroom, where a soft, thick pile of blankets was heaped onto a mattress that just sat on the treehouse's bare floor, devoid of any kind of frame. As soon as Raz laid eyes on it it looked incredibly tempting. Lili fell into it at once, and he was close behind her. Not two minutes later, he was asleep.

-xxx-

Raz jolted awake to find that he had somehow been sleeping standing up. His back was propped against a solid surface behind him; he turned, and it was the stone grey clock tower, now dry and smooth. He was back in Fannie's brain.

Turning back outward away from the tower, he saw that the little village had regained a lot of its color. Though it was twilight, grass was shining green up from the cracks in the grey stone pathway, and the houses, though still identifiable by door color, had brightened considerably in terms of roofs and windows and gardens. Out in the Emersons' front yard, Evie and her brother were chasing after fireflies and putting them in a jar. Bernie sat on his tiny porch playing his banjo.

The most noticeable change, however, was that down the path where Raz had first arrived, there now laid a fifth cottage, slightly removed from the rest of the circle. The door to this house was bright fuchsia, and growing right next to it was a tall tree. Raz was fairly certain he knew who lived there. He headed down the path and through her door without knocking, to speak to her.

"Mrs. Croshaw?"

"Well hello, Razputin," she said, looking over to him from where she stood by her mantle, dusting and cleaning. "What are you doing back in here?"

"I...don't really know," said Raz. "I hadn't really planned on coming back. Though it's nice to see everything looks so...well, nice."

"You did a good job, kid."

He noticed that she had paused, lingering at a framed photograph. Taking a couple steps closer, he saw that it was of Fannie herself, and a young teenage boy. Even Raz himself could see the similarities. The loss was clear in Fannie's eyes as she stared down at the photo, and that's when Raz made up his mind.

"Mrs. Croshaw, when I find Kasper Galochio, I'm going to get your grandson back."

She looked back up at him, and smiled, in a strange kind of way. "You've done so much for me already - _thank_ you," she said. "You've got a good heart in you, not just a good mind. If there's any of him left to get back - "

"There will be," Raz swore. "And I'll do it."

"Well then do one more thing for me," Fannie said, setting the picture back down, "and listen to what I'm about to say."

"Yeah?"

"That little girl of yours...you hang onto her and do right by her, you hear? I don't wanna be _morbid_, but...well, if something should happen to your father, she's all you got. You know?"

Raz tensed. He _did_ know. His dad wasn't his only family, but he _was_ the only one of them Raz felt comfortable with right now. Any one of his siblings could be the one that, in this horrible hypothetical situation, led to his dad's demise. Then he really only would have Lili.

"Yeah," he said, though he was still a little distant, lost in his thoughts. "Yeah, I really will."

"Good," she said. "Now, if you head on out back by that tree, you should be able to find a way back into your own head, and get some real sleep. I'll see you in the morning."

"Goodnight, Mrs. Croshaw."

"Goodnight, Razputin."

He followed the way she was pointing and went out the back door, to where the big scraggly tree stood. At its base was one of those strange chartreuse teleport creatures that seemed to run amok in everyone's minds. Smiling at seeing something so familiar, Raz stepped over to it and allowed it to transport him back into the collective unconscious.

The swirling blue void he entered was hardly the small circle of psyches he'd had access to in his short stay at Whispering Rock. With each mission he'd gone on, and each mental world he'd experienced, the collective unconscious Raz could see had spiderwebbed out into a big, sprawling map of clusters and connecting bridges. Trying to focus on his own mental signal, Raz set out from the door that said "Croshaw Township" and ran down along some gravity-defying twists and turns until he finally reached his own.

The last door he passed on his right before encountering his own mental world said "Lili Blossom Shopping Mall," and was definitely resonating with the mental wavelength of his girlfriend. In front of it, he paused, and studied on it for a moment, wondering...

But he shook his head, not letting himself go there, and walked back into his own mind instead.

-xxx-

Raz slept the rest of the night in his own head, devoid of dreams or anything else that might have upset his mind or those around it. When he woke up, Lili was already out of the bed, sitting in the other room with Fannie as the older woman cooked something delicious-smelling for breakfast. His head hurt a little from sleeping on his goggles, and he reached up and tugged them off, entering the larger room with a yawn.

Lili laid eyes on him and cracked up laughing. "Oh my god, you should see your forehead! You should see your _hair_! Ahahaha!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," he grumbled. He wasn't really a morning person. "What's for breakfast? If you don't watch out, I'll eat _all_ of it."

"Just some sticky buns," said Fannie. "I'm not much of a cook, but nowadays they come in these pre-packaged dealies and they're really quite easy." She pulled down a panel in one wall to reveal the inside of an oven, hidden away behind it. Raz had kind of wondered where she was actually cooking things.

"No, seriously, your hair is terrible." Lili hopped up from the little chair and crossed to him, standing on her tiptoes to try and smooth it out. Standing so close to her, Raz started to remember the conversation he'd had with Fannie the night before, and it just seemed right to grab her around the waist and tug her close for a not-quite-G-rated kiss.

When they finished up she stood blinking at him. "_Wow_. What was _that_ for?"

"No reason," he said, with a sleepy smile.

"If it weren't for your godawful morning breath that would have been amazing," she said. "If you lemme go I'll get you some juice."

"Not just yet," said Raz.

Eventually he did, though, and they all sat down to breakfast (Raz and Lili shared the one chair, and Fannie pulled a small stool out of nowhere). Lili planned out the best way to get back to Whispering Rock - fortunately, it lay between their current location and the RMPH, so it shouldn't take nearly as long, and as an added bonus they had daylight on their side. Raz just listened on - she was better at this long-term stuff, he kind of did things on the fly - and every once in a while exchanged knowing glances with Fannie. He was going to keep all of his promises.

When they left, Fannie took their map and marked her exact location on it with a little drawing of a music note, and they exchanged friendly goodbyes. Making sure they were headed in the right direction, Raz and Lili levitated off again, across Jeremiah Fields and then back into the forest. A few hours later, they started recognizing the trees and strange outcroppings of rock, and it was about eleven-thirty when they finally entered the main Whispering Rock campgrounds and made their way to Sasha's laboratory. Raz made sure to knock - he knew Sasha wasn't very fond of sudden interruptions or anything that he hadn't made plans for. To his surprise, the door was answered rather frantically.

"Razputin!" Sasha cried, looking far less composed than was typical for the usually quite reserved older Psychonaut. "Just the person I wanted to see!"

"Sasha?"

"I need your help."


	7. Unopened

(**AN:** I apologize for the huge delay on this! I had to get back to school, and then there was all this crazy sorority hoop-jumping bullshit. The next chapter may take me a little while too, because we're still working on formal recruitment, but hopefully there shouldn't be too long of a wait any more. In payment, please accept longer chapter lengths for both chapter 6 and chapter 7! Thanks again for being patient.)

**CHAPTER 6: Unopened**

"What's going on, Sasha?" asked Raz, totally confused

"Follow me, it's urgent. Oh, hello Miss Zanotto. But no time for pleasantries." He strode briskly back into the lab, and Raz and Lili followed, half-curious and half-nervous. What would make Sasha act like this?

"We don't have much time," Sasha continued as they hurried through the facility. "I've tried everything I can think of, but nothing has been successful. In here." Sasha opened a door that Raz had never really seen before and ushered them into a very strange room.

It appeared to be someone's living space - a girl, from the decor, and a rather messy one at that. A wide, squat bed with a green and purple floral-pattern comforter and far too many pillows filled one entire corner. There was a small desk on the opposite wall. A strange sort of tank or cage of some kind filled the wallspace between, a huge sprawling habitat for some lucky pet. Taped up haphazardly all over the walls was a disjointed collage of glossy, cut-out images - there were lots of pictures of turtles, some fancy cakes from cooking magazines or even bridal catalogues, bunches of flowers, dark gloomy European castles, brains, glowing yellow eyeballs....

It occurred to both Raz and Lili in about the same instant. This was Sheegor's room.

"Sheegor's missing?" gasped Raz, jumping to the most obvious conclusion. Raz _was_ Sasha's supposed "kidnapping specialist," after all.

"What?" cried Sasha. "Oh, no, it's not that. She's just on vacation visiting family. No..." Sasha's wall came down and he actually started fussing. "It's that _turtle_!" He gestured dramatically to the giant turtle habitat and its multi-colored tubes and boxes. "I followed her exact directions! I gave it those chocolate-covered turtle food pellets twice a day and replenished its water supply every other day! I turned on the light jazz music at night, and I kept the room at the right temperature and with the right amount of light. What have I _done_?" He shook his head, pressing a gloved hand to his face in dismay.

"Whoa, _whoa_, Sasha, slow down!" said Raz. "The _turtle_? What's wrong with him?"

Sasha sighed. "It won't come out of its shell. It's been like this for a day and a half, just curled up in there. Sheegor's going to be back in less than an hour, and...and I think I've killed it."

"Calm down, Sasha, just calm down. You haven't killed the turtle."

"Are you sure?" quipped Lili. "I've seen what this guy can do to houseplants."

"You're not helping!" Raz turned back to Sasha. "Look, I'm sure the turtle's okay. Maybe there's just something wrong with him. Could he be sick?"

"But I did everything exactly like she told me to," Sasha protested weakly.

"Well, I don't really know how to help, Sasha."

Sasha perked back up at this. "But that's just it, Razputin! You're going to get inside that turtle's head and figure out what's wrong!"

"Me?" echoed Raz. "Is this what you wanted me for? You could have done that yourself!"

"You have experience!" Sasha insisted. "You've been inside the brain of an animal before."

"Yeah, but that animal was a giant, mutant lungfish! It was practically sentient!"

"This turtle can talk," Lili pointed out.

"Still not helping!"

"Besides," Sasha added, "astral projection is your field of specialty. I'm just a telepathist. If we were shooting the turtle, or broadcasting it a message, I'd have no trouble, but - "

"Okay, okay, I'll go inside the freaking turtle!" Raz finally said. "But! You have to do something for me."

"Anything, Razputin, I'm begging you," said Sasha. "If anything goes wrong with this turtle, I'm going to have one angry lab assistant on my hands. If you think her voice is irritating when she's speaking normally, imagine her when she's furious!"

"Yikes, good point," said Raz. "What I need from you is to get us Milla's Moral Compass."

Sasha made a face. "She doesn't like loaning that thing out, she's very attached to it. And I would feel bad going behind her back like this. Why don't you just ask her directly?"

"Because I'm fourteen," Raz said flatly. "And fourteen is like, nine in Milla years."

"You have a point. Well, I hope you're using it for something important. It'll be my ass she kicks if anything happens to it."

"Oh, I don't imagine Milla could stay angry at _you_ for very long, Sasha," Lili said teasingly.

"...You're right, Razputin, she's not really helping, is she."

Raz laughed, and reached into his backpack for his psycho-portal. Sasha opened up the turtle's home and pulled the reptile in question out, setting him on Sheegor's desk.

"Where do I put this thing if I can't stick it on his head?"

"I suppose just placing it at the front of the shell will do."

"Well, here goes nothing." Raz hefted the little door in one hand and grabbed Lili's wrist with the other.

"Wait - _me_?"

"Oh yeah. You're coming too," said Raz. "If we're trying to get this done in record time, I'm gonna need all the help I can get."

"Why not take Sasha?"

"I need to stay out here and guard," said Sasha. "If Sheegor gets back before the two of you are through, I'll need to stall for time."

"You're not _scared_, are you Lili?"

"Ch, _no_," Lili argued, though Raz wasn't quite convinced. "I've just...well, I've only been in a couple of people's brains before, and never a _turtle_. And astral projection isn't _my_ specialty, I'm a telekinetic!"

"Then I guess you'll have to hang on tight."

She grabbed him around the waist. Raz stuck the portal solidly to the front of the turtle, slipped his goggles into place, and drifted out of his own head, with Lili not far behind him.

-xxx-

"_Whoa._"

Green. Everything was just so..._green_.

Well, okay, a lot of it was white too. There was a vast, round castle looming up in front of them, and its stone walls were a pale, marbley white. But with veins of green running through it, and decorative ivy (also green) crawling up the sides in places. The grass beneath their feet was a thick, lush green as well, the intense green that grass is immediately after it rains. And behind them, as Raz turned around to look, was a thick moat of water, surrounding the castle. The water was a cool, clear green, with small white flowers and green lily pads floating in it, and there was no drawbridge.

"I guess turtles wouldn't need one," he mumbled.

"Need what?" asked Lili, to his left.

"A drawbridge to get across the moat."

"Neither would we, really - we could just levitate."

"_You_ could levitate," Raz corrected with a scowl.

"Oh, that's _right_," Lili said with a wince. "Your curse, it - "

"Stops my psychic abilities from working. Howie at the office says it's a panic override that blocks out parts of my brain so that all I focus on is basic instincts. To preserve my health."

"So weird. And you're sure you can't get a specialist to disengage that?"

"Not as long as the curse is in place."

"So I guess we better keep working on that."

They both turned to face the white marble castle again. It really was oddly constructed - the main, base part of the castle was vaguely cylindrical, and about a third of the way up or so was a balcony that encircled the entire thing (green, of course). Another similar balcony split the remaining height of the castle. Then, sticking up out of the top, there were four slim towers, placed evenly from one another and from the edge of the castle in a sort of square. These towers all had what looked like big lanterns or torches mounted at the top, though none of them were lit.

Lili gasped suddenly. "It's a _cake_!"

Confused, Raz studied the castle again, and it kind of clicked. The balconies were the middle layers of frosting! And the towers with their lanterns were the unlit birthday candles.

"It _is_ a cake," Raz echoed. "Crap, I'm hungry now. We should have had lunch first!"

"Think with your brain, not your stomach," said Lili. "Let's head inside and get to the bottom of this."

"Or the cream-filled center," Raz mused, still lost in thought about tasty desserts. Lili rolled her eyes and grabbed his arm, tugging him along for a few paces before he snapped out of it. They circled the castle-cake until they found the tall, wide door inside, which miraculously was wide open. There were two guards, one posted on either side of it, but they weren't doing a whole lot of guarding.

"It's just like the real Pokeylope," Lili marveled, crouching down to look at one of them. A helmet and a spear were lying on the ground next to him, and the turtle himself was completely retracted inside of his shell.

Raz was messing with the other one. "Hello in there?" he called, but it didn't budge, so he nudged the shell lightly with his foot. The curve of the turtle's underbelly made it rock back and forth. When he still didn't open up, Raz knocked firmly on the outside.

"These guys are really closed up," he finally said.

"Maybe we'd have better luck inside," said Lili.

So they continued onward, into the large entryway of the castle. There were curving hallways to the left and right, and in front of them lay another large door that led into the center of the castle.

"Left, right, or forward?" Raz asked Lili.

"Might as well go left first. We'll try to find someone who can tell us what's going on."

They headed off down the lefthand hallway. Soon they began to figure out that the floor-level of the castle was the servants' quarters. They passed several locked doors before finding one that opened. The room beyond was plain, but looked comfortable, and the turtle living in it was tucked neatly inside its shell on the floor with no sign of having moved for a while.

"I'm sensing a trend here," Raz grumbled.

"We should keep going anyway," said Lili.

They continued onward around the curving hall, encountering several more rooms with motionless turtles inside them, in addition to a bathing room, a carpenter's workshop and what appeared to be a kitchen. The bath attendant turtle, carpenter turtle, and cook turtle were also withdrawn. By the time they made their way back around the cake's circumference to the place where they'd begun, no turtle had been able to help them.

"I guess we try in here, then," said Raz, heading toward the central room. They had to open the wide door telekinetically since the beam holding it in place was so heavy. Inside, they descended a couple steps to the main floor and looked around, marveling. It was a huge atrium of a room, with the ceiling extending all the way up to the castle's roof. Set into the walls were two layers of balcony and walkway, where the rooms on the upper floors opened onto the atrium. A set of glass elevators on the other side of the room led up to those levels.

Between the elevators and the place where Raz and Lili stood, however, was a very large throne, and on that throne sat a not-very-large turtle who looked very familiar.

"Pokeylope!" Raz cried, and darted across the marble floor to him, but he looked inside his head just as he looked outside in the real world. He was completely withdrawn into his shell. Lying next to him on the throne was his tiny golden crown.

"Just like everyone else," Raz said with a frown.

"What's this?" Lili wondered. She picked up an object from the floor at the foot of the throne. It was a broad, silver platter with a few brown crumbs and smears of pink still stuck to it.

"He sure loves his cake, doesn't he," said Raz, examining what was left of the chocolate treat. "Man, I wish there were still some of that left, because I would totally eat it."

"Why would he suddenly clam up like this and not even clean up after his cake?" Lili wondered, gesturing with the plate still in her hand. It passed in front of the turtle shell for a brief second - and in that brief second, the shell twitched, all on its own.

"What'd you do?" Raz cried.

"Do? What _did_ I do?" She looked at him like he was crazy, but he took the plate from her hand and tried it again. Slowly, he waved the remains of the cake under where Pokeylope's nose should be, and the turtle rocked back and forth, staying curled up but definitely taking notice.

"I think he wants more cake," said Raz. "Maybe they all do, you think?" He stood back up and turned to Lili, but she wasn't there. Instead, she had crossed the room to a broad tapestry that was hanging on the wall, just inside the door, so they'd mostly missed it when they'd entered.

"Uh, Raz?" she called out to him.

"What is it?"

"How much time do you think we have in here before Sheegor roasts Sasha alive?"

He headed over to stand beside her and looked up at the tapestry too, curious as to what she was getting at. Slowly, the reality of their situation started to sink in.

Listed on the tapestry was a huge index of every person living inside the castle - "Marzipan Palace," apparently. There seemed to be forty or fifty turtles, servants and nobles alike, with names anywhere from "Carapastian VI of Sauntershire" to "Bill." And next to each and every name was what appeared to be his or her favorite variety of cake. King Samuel Pokey-Loper, at the top of the list, corresponded with "strawberry-frosted chocolate."

"You don't suppose - "

"These are the only things that will snap them out of it," Lili groaned. "What the _hell_? I wanna know who ever heard of a turtle that likes cake! Turtles eat bugs and plants and stuff!"

"How the heck are we supposed to come up with like forty different kinds of cake, anyway?" said Raz. "We don't know which turtles are which, except for Pokeylope, and I guess maybe we could figure out who 'Carpenter Steve' and 'Chef Archibald' are - "

They froze, and lifted their gazes to match one another. Then something snapped, and they were both scrambling.

"What's it say for him?"

"Lemon cake with powdered sugar. That should be easy enough, right?"

"If we're lucky enough we can probably find a recipe in there and crank this out. But come on, we've gotta hurry!"

They bolted out of the throne room, around the outside hallway and into the kitchen, and started making a cake.

-xxx-

Bakers they weren't.

They'd been levitating ingredients off the shelves like crazy, this way and that, flour and sugar flying everywhere. They'd made a horrendous mess of the kitchen, which made Raz feel bad a little, but they were having to go as quickly as possible, and he really did think they'd managed to cut down on time. Lili found something they thought was _probably_ meant for baking cakes in, and they'd beaten eggs and stirred batter and finally thrown everything together in the pan. But now what they had to do was wait for it to cook. And Raz was exhausted.

He'd slumped against the oven door, sitting on the floor. Lili was propped on a stool, her face buried in the crook of her arms against the table. She looked pretty tired too.

"How much longer?" he whined feebly.

"I think we've got forty minutes," said Lili with a groan. "How long is that gonna translate out from brain-time into real-world time?"

"I dunno," said Raz.

They fell silent again. Raz looked down at his sweater and picked off a drying drip of cake batter.

"I...I never thought that I'd end up having to _make a cake_ to save my dad," Raz said after a while, smiling a little at how absurd it was.

"Geez, Raz, I'd almost forgotten about your dad," Lili said guiltily. "I keep shifting to the next immediate goal. Do you...think he's okay?"

"I know he is," Raz insisted. "He's _my dad_."

She rolled her head up, slowly, and looked at him. Smudged across her nose was a little bit of flour, or maybe it was the powdered sugar. It made her look especially cute, and if Raz could have motivated himself to get up from the floor, he might have kissed it away.

"Raz..." she said softly. "What happened to your mother?"

The question took him by surprise, and he was a bit taken aback by it. But at the same time...he'd known her for four years, and never gotten around to telling her this? "The curse took her," he said, "like it got my grandfather."

"But that doesn't make sense. Your mom was only an Aquato by marriage, right?"

"Yeah," he said, "but the curse activated on her after they were together for seven years." He smiled, a little sadly. "It's funny, they say it might not have gotten her at all if she just hadn't changed her last name."

"That's terrible."

"I don't believe that, though," said Raz. "She was so dedicated to the circus...she was always an Aquato at heart."

"Geez, Raz," said Lili, "you've been through so much. I always just thought they were divorced." Almost like an afterthought, she added, "Like my parents."

"What drove them apart, anyway?" asked Raz. "Since we're getting personal, and all."

"Dad's job," she said. "Like there's much of a question there. She's not a psychic, so there were a lot of things he couldn't tell her, and she was really frustrated at how his job was so secretive. Finally, right around the time I was born, he revealed that side of himself to her, and she was really weirded out by it, so she decided to leave. She couldn't really take it any more." Lili paused, and cocked her head, dislodging some of the flour. "She almost won custody of me, too, since courts like to side with the mom and all. But my dad was the one providing for the household - and then they figured out that I was psychic, too, so they wanted me to stay with the psychic parent. Which makes a lot of sense."

"You seem so chill with all of that," said Raz.

"I was just a baby, so I never really grew up with her," she said. "I'm totally used to it. I think it would be weird_er_ if she just reappeared and wanted to be part of my life. She sends me birthday cards and stuff - sometimes money, which is always a bonus - but we're just not...really..._family_."

"So they're really not like my parents at all."

"I guess not."

Raz scratched at the back of his head and yawned. "Well, at least we know we won't end up like that."

"Yeah, you're right," said Lili.

Then they both seemed to realize what they had said. Lili's hand drifted to her lips, stunned, and Raz looked down at the messy floor. Was he actually thinking like that? Was _she_ actually thinking like that?

All too late, she tried to cover it up. "I mean..."

"Right, because..."

"Yeah."

They fell silent again, and stayed that way until the timer went off, announcing that the cake was ready.


	8. Unsafe

(**AN:** So I've coerced one of my sorority sisters into playing Psychonauts, and hanging out with her while she does so has been a huge inspiration! I'm finally getting to parts of this fic that I really wanted to write when I went into it. Please accept this slightly fillerish chapter, and psych yourself up for the next one – which for some reason is like 3500 words. Raz and Lili keep running away with me!)

**CHAPTER 7: Unsafe**

As soon as Lili opened the oven door, the turtle shell resting on the floor by the window started rocking.

"I think it worked!" Raz exclaimed. "Come on, come on..."

Telekinetically, Lili lifted the still-warm cake from the oven and across the room, setting it carefully down beside the now frantically pitching reptile. The second it sat completely on the floor his head popped out. "What's that I smell?" he asked in a light, nasal voice, sniffing at the cake. His front legs came next, snatching at the dessert, and then his hind legs - which he proceeded to stand on, like the dancing bears at the circus - popped out to support his weight. He lifted the cake in front of him and smiled a strange turtle smile. "My my my, don't _you_ look scrumptious! Mmm-mmmmm." He was about to take a huge bite directly from the cake - no silverware or anything - when he started, and looked around. "Now where did you come from?"

"From us," Raz offered, and the chef turtle turned to face him. "I'm Raz, and this is Lili. We're...uhm..."

"Friends of Sheegor's?" Lili offered, and Raz nodded. That seemed to make sense.

"Sent here by Her Human Highness Lady Shigoria?" he gasped, eyes impossibly wider (he did look an awful lot like Pokeylope, after all). "Well why didn't you say so in the first place!" He devoured the cake in five quick bites, then rushed at them, gushing.

Raz leaned in to whisper to Lili. "Did he just call Sheegor 'Highness'?"

"Did he just call Sheegor 'human'?" Lili hissed back.

"I should have _known_ you'd be sent by Her Loveliness," the chef sighed. "Why, in her absence we've all just been pinin' away in here, lost and unloved." Tears of despair leaked theatrically from his eyes for all of two seconds. "That German fellow, he's nice and all, but he is all brains and no heart. We just can't get by without a tender hand!"

Raz squinted and frowned at the turtle chef. "Wait. You're saying all of this - you, and the rest of the castle, and Pokeylope in the real world - you all just clammed up and stopped moving because you _miss Sheegor_?"

"She's been gone for _five days_," he sobbed, as if that explained everything.

"She's going to be back any minute now, though!" Raz insisted, throwing up his hands in aggravation. "Can we just make the cakes and get on with this?"

"Oh, you betcha! Now that our lady, sweet and lumpy as the finest oatmeal, is returning to us, I should be able to pop these suckers out left and right!" He paused in his idol worship, though, and frowned. "Well, but..."

"But what?" Lili asked, rolling her eyes.

"I'm a speedy baker, but that doesn't mean I'll be winning any sprint races any time soon. If you're trying to do this quickly, and I'm making cakes for the whole dern castle - "

"You leave that to us, Mr. Archibald!" Raz swore. "Tell us where to send them and we'll take them there!"

The next hour or so was a total blur. Archibald, as flamboyant and ridiculous as he seemed, was actually very professional when it came to his trade, and seemed to be able to whip up perfect cakes in mere seconds. After that, Raz and Lili wheeled around on their levitation balls like oldschool roller skate waitresses, delivering carrot cake to Dame Tortoisia on the third floor (visiting from the neighboring kingdom) and depositing shortcake after shortcake to a family of maids and butlers at the complete opposite curve of the downstairs hall. The last cake to emerge from the oven was none other than a strawberry-frosted chocolate cake, designed specifically for the king himself.

"Be super-careful with that one there!" whined Archibald. "His Majesty can get kinda picky." Together, Lili and Raz presented the mental Pokeylope with his favorite dish, and it was consumed within seconds, before he even bothered to notice the two of them.

But then he did notice. "Hey there. What're you two cats doin' in my brain, man?"

"Trying to save Sasha," said Raz.

"He's probably going to have a panic attack if you don't snap out of it soon," Lili added.

"My flames of love are out," Pokeylope told them. "It's hard to keep 'em burnin' with my little lady gone from my side, after all."

"She should be back any minute now, though," Raz assured him.

"Well then why don't you crazy kids head up there and light 'em up for me, hmmm?" he suggested, and before their eyes the ceiling of the atrium room slid open to the outside world. "I remember you were pretty good at startin' fires."

Raz looked up, turned back to Lili and shrugged his shoulders, and then levitated out onto the top of the castle. She was right behind him. Focusing intently on the four candle-torch-towers, the two of them used their powers of pyrokinesis and set each one alight. From below them, the entire turtle population of the castle erupted into cheers, and Raz even thought he saw Pokeylope send them a tiny turtle wink. He didn't know if that made him feel accomplished or creeped out, but it turned out to not really matter, because their astral projections were quickly fading away from Marzipan Palace and back into their bodies, in Sheegor's room in Sasha's lab.

"You don't say. Your aunt Francie sounds like a very...fascinating person. How many shrunken heads?"

"Only eight, but she's getting a new one sometime in September. Since when are you so interested in my family, anyway?"

"I just feel so...alienated from you," Sasha was saying, from the other side of Sheegor's closed door. "You've been such a good assistant but we've never really opened up to one another."

"Well," said Sheegor, "what about your family?"

"An excellent question," said Sasha, panicking slightly. "See, I, er - that is - "

"He _could_ tell you some great stories, but they're only really funny in German," Raz said smoothly, opening the door from the inside and smiling at the two on the other side. "And anyway, there's somebody in here who's dying to see you..."

"Pokeylope!" Sheegor squealed, and nearly trampled Raz in her haste to reach her reptilian friend. He and Lili stepped neatly out of the way and let the two of them spend some much-needed alone time together, joining Sasha in the hallway.

"How long?" Raz asked.

"Only about ten minutes," Sasha said, "but it was ten minutes of hell."

"Hell does sound like the kind of place that Aunt Francie would probably live in," Raz agreed.

"While you were...out, however," he added, "I did manage to sneak over to Milla's office." Reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, Sasha withdrew a round device, solid pink on the back and clear plastic on the front. Inside was a free-floating, rotating triangle of black, and as soon as it passed to Raz's hand, the triangle jerked pointedly in a solid northeastward direction.

"A Moral Compass," Raz breathed, raising it level with his eyes, fixated.

"They're, ah, not usually pink. I believe she's had it customized. Regardless, there you have it."

"We're heading northeast," said Lili, eyeing it closely too.

"We're heading to Kasper Galochio," said Raz.

"How far do you plan to travel?" asked Sasha. "I'd hate to think of you wasting time, especially if it's for such a vital task as this."

"Sasha's right," said Lili. "The directions Fannie gave us would put us somewhere in eastern Canada."

"I guess I just figured that we'd take Ford's jet," said Raz. "It's not like he's really using it right now."

"Absolutely not," Sasha ordered. "Neither one of you is properly trained to pilot that vehicle, and I have volatile experiments at work that I cannot afford to leave Sheegor in charge of."

"I didn't really think this through," Raz admitted. He hung his head, arms drooping to his sides. What the heck had he been thinking?

"Unless..." Sasha mumbled.

"Unless what?" demanded Lili, eyes fierce. "Is there any way we can do this?" And Raz couldn't help but smile - it was so easy to forget how much she cared. Because she cared a _lot_.

"There's been some experimentation put into the cultivation of a new psychic ability - matter transportation. We've been studying the strange teleport creatures that inhabit nearly everyone's minds and trying to apply the same sort of brain wave techniques, but in the real world rather than the mental one." When they looked confused, he translated. "In short, a particularly skilled psychic might be able to merely _think_ himself to another location."

"Define 'particularly skilled,'" said Raz, catching on.

"Probably someone who's had many, many years in the field and extensive practice in stable, laboratory scenarios, with plenty of psychic medics on standby to repair any physical or mental damage," said Sasha. But he paused, and looked at Raz, with a faint smile in his eyes, barely discernible behind his dark glasses. "Or - perhaps - a person who has shown remarkable skill in mastering new abilities in extremely short amounts of time, with a malleable psyche and the most determination I have ever seen."

Raz smiled back at him with nervous admiration. "Agent Nein?"

"Yes, Agent Aquato. Yes, indeed."

-xxx-

A panel opened up in Sasha's floor, and the older Psychonaut led Raz and Lili down a narrow, twisting staircase, into the depths of his experimentation facilities. As Raz followed behind him, he had to admit that he was really, really nervous.

Sasha was placing an awful lot of faith in him. Heck, he was placing an awful lot of faith in _himself_. Nearly everything he'd done so far on this ridiculous quest had been a result of flukes and coincidences, ending up in the right place at the right time to further their mission - _his_ mission. It was Raz's dumb luck that they hadn't died yet, running around in the woods with crazed invisible wolves and crazed retired musicians and who knew what else. And this...this was the least safe endeavor of all. If he should screw up, and anything should happen to him...well, his dad was placing an awful lot of faith in him, too.

"Something on your mind, Razputin?" Sasha asked, though the question was pretty rhetorical, as Raz had felt him peering into his head for the past fifteen seconds or so.

"Are you sure we're not gonna die, Sasha?"

"Not at all," he said truthfully. "But...well, I don't usually act on hunches and feelings, but some part of me is fairly certain that you're not going to fail at this."

Raz made a face. "I guess coming from you that should be reassuring."

"We'll find out soon enough."

He had stopped in front of them, and beyond him was a doorway with no door in it that led into a small, pale grey room. At the center of the room was a round, raised platform, two shades of green spiraling together, with a strange contraption hanging above it that looked like a hanging light fixture but that Raz could tell instantly was not.

"If the two of you could just...stand over there," Sasha said with a gesture. Slowly, and with trepidation, first Raz and then Lili stepped up onto the platform. Two people on it was a tight fit and they had to cling together.

"Raz," Lili said, and nothing more, but he heard everything in her voice.

"I know," said Raz. "Just hold on."

On the wall adjacent to the door there were a lot of panels and switches, and Sasha stepped to them, manipulating assorted variables and making a couple strange humming noises. After what seemed like ages he pulled a large lever into position, and the device above Raz's head clicked on like a lamp but shone with something that Raz knew was more than just light.

"Concentrate, both of you," Sasha instructed over the machine's loud whirring. "If you can't both focus on the teleportation, then it would be best for Miss Zanotto to make her mind completely blank. Any discrepancy could cause an error."

Raz pictured it all in his head. He envisioned the Moral Compass, pointing them steadfastly northeast. He pictured the map that Fannie Croshaw had given them outlining a general area that Kasper Galochio could be inhabiting. He thought hard about things that he associated with the Canadian wilderness, whatever the heck that really was. But most of all, his mind turned to the people he loved most - his father, lost at sea, and Lili, placing an awful lot of faith in him. He couldn't let any of them down. He was a Psychonaut, and Psychonauts saved minds and bodies.

The machine was whirring louder, and faster, and the "light" above them was flickering in and out.

"It's working!" cried Sasha, struggling to make himself heard. "Don't let your mind wander! Concentrate!"

_I'm going to Canada,_ Raz told himself. _Eastern Canada. Far away from here. I'm going to vanish from this spot and reappear in the place where I need to be. I'm going to save my dad. I'm going to make it there with Lili intact. I'm going to __**teleport**__._

And quite suddenly, he did.

-xxx-

The next thing Raz knew, he was standing in the center of a grimy gravel road, the distinct feeling of vertigo swirling in his head. He fell to his knees, but that wasn't enough to stabilize him, and he ended up rocking to the side and retching. And here he thought all the vertigo had been trained out of him when he'd had to learn to walk a tightrope dozens of feet up at age eight. Guess you did learn something new every day. Soon the pitiful contents of his stomach were just another substance contributing to the street's grossness.

When no glib comment about how attractive his puking was reached his ears, Raz realized frantically that he was _alone_ in the center of a grimy gravel road.

"Lili!" he screamed, though it came out a little garbled with his throat still coated with bile. He swallowed roughly and tried again. "_Lili!_" Tugging his goggles up to his forehead, Raz scoured the horizon, searching desperately for Lili. There was no sign of life to be seen anywhere - just the gravel road stretching out behind and in front of him, and forest on either side.

When a third vocal cry didn't get any results, Raz tried reaching out with his mind. Telepathy was far from his strong suit - he was way better at its hostile uses than its friendly ones - but if he could teleport, he could handle this. _Lili! Lili, where are you?_

Faintly, seeming strong but very far away, a response reached him. _Raz? Oh my god, Raz, where are you?_

Raz breathed an enormous sigh of relief. _I'm in the middle of some gravel road. I can't really see anything but the road and like...woods._

_I can...see the road from where I am,_ thought Lili. _I'm in the woods. And way off to my right is like...a gas station or something, some building._ There was a little pause, and then, _Raz, I...I'm hurt, I think. There's something wrong with my arm._

_What? What happened? What's wrong?_

_It's like a little chunk of it is just...missing._ Lili's mental voice did seem a little pained. _Not too much, but I'm bleeding. I think I'm going to try to get to this building and see if they can help me._

_But where _are_ you? In relation to me?_

_Use the Compass..._ Lili was too far away now, her telepathy fading, but Raz quickly dug into his pocket and lifted out Milla's pink Moral Compass. In his grasp, it floated from nearly due north - the way to Kasper - to a position pointing him west down the gravel road, in the direction of his injured girlfriend. It was his own fault that a patch of her hadn't teleported correctly; finding her, and helping her, was the _right thing to do_. Raz rolled off down the road on his levitation ball, racing to her.

After a while, the place she'd described came into view - it actually was a gas station, or at least it had used to be, with a big red awning covering rusted old pumps and a small convenience store-type place attached in the back. As soon as Raz was close enough to see it all in detail it started weirding him out. Something was definitely wrong with this place. But though all of it looked like it had been run down for at least a few years, the flickering neon sign in the window still lit up _OPEN_, and as he drew closer to the door, Raz noticed a little spot of blood staining the ground. Lili's blood.

He burst through the door, nearly knocking the little bell that announced his entry to the floor. "Lili!"

"Raz," she called back, not quite as powerfully. He followed the sound of her voice until he found her at the back of the store, unrolling toilet paper around her left arm in the place of a bandage. He ran to her, preparing for an embrace, but before he could wrap his arms around her shoulders she smacked him on the back of the head.

"Don't screw up next time, bonehead!" she snapped, scowling at him. "We don't have time for you to screw up!"

"Oh, well, excuse me, then you try teleporting us across the entire country when you've never done it before, see if you can do it on the first try."

"You're supposed to get _everything_ right on the first try!" she insisted. "You're just awesome and perfect like that."

Raz opened his mouth to bite back, but her arm was distracting him. Already a bit of blood had seeped through the six layers of paper. Instead, he sighed, and turned away from her a little. "How is it that you can call me awesome and perfect and still have it make me feel bad?"

"It's about time someone humbled you, you big showoff." But her voice had softened, and she had added more toilet paper, and tied it in place with a couple of spare hairbands pulled from her purse. "Now come on, we should grab some food here. I know the sign says the place is open, but I didn't see anyone around - and I don't know about you, but I definitely puked back there, and we haven't eaten lunch either." She was walking away, heading down the aisles of snack foods, trying to find something worth eating. "You want those little doughnuts, or something?"

Raz blinked a little, snapping back to the reality of the situation, and then followed her around the shelf and shook his head. "N...nothing that resembles cake. Not today."

"Good point. Potato chips?"

"Better." He kept walking beyond her, to the refrigerators full of beverages along the back. "What do you want to drink?"

"Do they have Welch's grape soda?"

Raz studied. "They've got Fanta - that's okay, right?"

"Ch, _no_," said Lili. "You're obviously not a connoisseur of grape soda. Just...get me a lemonade or something."

"Yes, _ma'am_," he muttered sarcastically, taking one for her and a big bottle of water for himself. His father's repeated assertions that excess caffeine and sugar would hinder his circus performance had pretty much ruined sodas for him. He met her in the front where she offered him some chips out of an open jumbo-sized bag.

"I feel kinda bad just...taking this stuff," he admitted.

"No one's here," she said. "What are we supposed to do?"

"I'm at least going to leave some money on the counter, or something," Raz insisted, and he put a five-dollar bill by the register before they left, heading back out to the gravel road.

After another mouthful of chips, which left Lili struggling to hold the bag in her injured left arm since she was eating with her right, she nudged him in the side. "Check the Compass again."

He looked, and it was pointing them north-northeast again. "I think we're finally heading in the right direction."

"Let's get going, then. This place is giving me the creeps."

"I think...I think it's because _he's_ around here," Raz said, voicing an opinion he'd slowly been forming.

"He who? Kasper?"

"Yeah," he said. "I noticed it in the woods, too - no rustling animal noises, no birds flying overhead. And this road looks like no one's driven on it in ages. I don't think there are any living creatures around here."

Lili shifted the makeshift bandages around her arm. "Raz, this is getting serious," she said.

"Yeah, it is," he agreed.

They looked across to each other, and grinned.

"_Awesome_."


	9. Uninvited

(**AN:** I am sorry this took so stinkin' long! My sorority just went through what's basically our rush period, and I literally went four days without even turning on my computer. Now my life is readjusting back to normal. I'm heading out to Katsucon this weekend, so if anyone wants a real life dream fluff, you should seek me out and say hello! I'd be happy to share my disgustingly sweet candy with any and all Psychonauts fans.)

**CHAPTER 8: Uninvited**

Something about mortal peril had always kind of screwed with Raz's head.

Up to a certain point, danger was, well, dangerous. He worried about things that you were supposed to worry about: the people he loved being in danger, something happening to himself, anything or anyone upsetting the general psychic order that the Psychonauts worked so hard to maintain. He also wasn't too keen on lots of stuff getting blown up or people picking on the little guy. Raz liked to consider himself a fairly normal, upstanding person, who liked doing his job because he liked helping people.

But there came a point - on every mission, in every life-threatening situation - where Raz went from worrying to anticipating. Where he went from anxiety to excitement. And at that point, Raz liked his job not because he liked to help people, but because kicking people's butts with your brain was _fun_.

This was also the point at which he was glad he had Lili, because she was probably the only girl in the world who felt exactly the same way.

"You're gonna be an awesome Psychonaut," Raz told her, out of nowhere, as they continued following the Moral Compass's bearing through the chilly Canadian forest.

"Damn right I am," she said, with a look that was half affection and half glare.

-xxx-

It was growing dark already. Raz was surprised at first - it had only been a few hours since they'd left Sasha's, and that had been around one o'clock - but then it had occurred to him that their teleportation had bumped them ahead a couple of time zones. It was probably almost seven where they were now. They levitated off and on - rolling when their legs got tired, walking when their brains got tired. The Moral Compass kept them moving in the right direction, but it seemed to be taking forever. Raz could barely take it anymore. _Something_ needed to happen.

"I'm tired," he complained after a while.

"I'm _hungry_," said Lili. "And...my arm hurts. Still."

"I'm so sorry, Lili."

"I know you are, dork."

Raz paused in their walking and reached into his backpack. "Well...I've got a couple of dream fluffs, if you want one. They'll keep our mental health up, at least."

"I guess it couldn't hurt."

Raz lifted the three small candies from his bag, passing two to Lili and keeping only one for himself. If she noticed, she didn't say anything, but he thought he caught her smiling for a moment.

"Damnit, why is this taking so long?" he groaned. "The directions Mrs. Croshaw gave us were obviously right, or this thing wouldn't be pointing in the right direction still, but I feel like we've been walking through here for _ages_. How long before we find this jerk, anyway?"

"It doesn't make any sense," Lili agreed. "I knew we'd probably have to go pretty far, but there's been no sign of any kind of life for miles and miles and it's pretty creepy. I just wanna know when we're going to run into something that - "

She stopped talking, a bizarre expression on her face, and Raz was just about to ask what was wrong when he felt it, too. They'd passed between a pair of trees and experienced a noticeable temperature drop - and not just externally, but in their minds as well. And when Raz tried to continue walking in the direction the Moral Compass was pointing, the air around him felt thick as tar. He had to put forth significant physical and mental energy just to take steps forward.

"He's here," he said, and Lili nodded with determination. They pressed further into the oppressive air, but only managed to move about fifteen feet before they needed to stop and breathe. The effort required was exhausting.

"Maybe...we should stop," Lili panted. "We could...make camp for the night...try again in the morning."

"We should camp...not here," Raz said. "Back on the other side."

"Yeah." They moved as quickly as they could back in the direction they had come, and discovered it was easier to do. Once they passed a certain point the pressure lifted, and they found themselves gasping for air.

"Okay, yeah, it is _definitely_ time to be done for the night," said Raz. "We can try this again in the morning when we've gotten some rest."

"But...your dad," said Lili. "Another whole night?"

"Believe me, I know," he said, looking down at the ground and off to the side. "But...Mrs. Croshaw said it, and she was right: we're never gonna save _him_ if something happens to _us_." He turned back to her. "How's...your arm?"

"It _hurts_," she said. "It feels like the..._cold_ of that space in there just made it worse." She made a face, concerned. "Raz...what _was_ that, anyway?"

Raz sat on the ground, finally too worn out to stand any more. "We ran into one of these on the mission I took with Noreen Pate and Katrina Zilch. This little girl...she was pretty much a psychic prodigy, but there was something super-off about her. She'd withdrawn inside herself so far that no one could get anywhere near her, because she'd built up this huge wall between her and everything else." As Lili sat down beside him, rubbing at her hurt arm, he scratched at the back of his head. "But this guy, I think this one's on purpose. He's _trying_ to isolate himself - he's doing everything he can to keep people out." His voice softened a little. "To keep _us_ out."

"Well he's doing a pretty good job," said Lili. "He must have a lot more enemies than just your family."

"Mrs. Croshaw did say that, didn't she."

Lili sighed, and sprawled out on her back. "Whatever. We can't keep going until tomorrow, so you should probably start us a fire or something so that we don't freeze to death in the Canadian wilderness."

"Why me?"

"_Someone_ hurt my arm."

"Hey, if you can carry a bag of chips, you can pick up a couple of sticks and _think_ at them really hard."

"You're just saying that because _you're_ too lazy to get up and do it yourself."

"Tell you what, if _you_, Miss I'm A Telekinetic, float some sticks into place, then _I_ will light them on fire, is that fair?"

The only response Raz received was an enormous log hovering a few inches from his face. He took it from her, tossed it a few feet away from them onto a spot of ground that was relatively devoid of stray leaves and pine needles, and focused on it until it heated and then burned.

"I. Am so. _Tired_," Lili whined.

"That mental force-field kind of kicked my ass," Raz agreed. "And I'm feeling like...teleportation-lag. Somehow. Maybe it'd be better if we went to sleep now and just got an early start tomorrow...Lili?"

Beside him, purse crumpled up for a pillow, Lili had already fallen asleep. Raz just smiled and shook his head, and copying her, rested his backpack under his head and settled in for the night, the log in front of them smoldering out as he lost consciousness.

-xxx-

Raz yawned himself awake and rubbed at his side, where he was growing a little stiff. He assumed it was because he'd been sleeping on the ground - no doubt a tree root was digging into his back, or an inconveniently-placed rock - but as he rolled over, he fell to a solid floor, and he realized he'd actually been sleeping on a vaguely stylish metal bench.

This seemed incredibly wrong, and as he climbed back to his feet, Raz began to figure out why.

The first major difference that he noticed was the change in surroundings. Rather than being all-but-lost in the middle of the forest, Raz was standing in the very center of the corridor at one end of what appeared to be a rather large shopping mall. Right in front of him was a big fountain, spilling over with sparkling water - but the water on the lefthand side seemed to be a faint pink color, and was sprinkled with several floating water lilies, while the right side of the fountain was built with a darker stone, and full of coins from wishes being made.

"That's...weird..." Raz muttered, but then he began to see that the half-and-half trend continued. As he looked to his left, the tiles on the walls and floor of the mall were a dull stone-pink. The decorative potted plants were all bursting with fragrant flowers, and the stores - as he took some hesitant steps forward, exploring the mall a bit more - all seemed to be of a light, feminine nature. The clothing and accessory stores were all full of stuff that appealed to stereotypical teenage girls: pinks and purples and baby blues, bright flashy jewelry and sparkly hairbands, cute patterns and tasteful bows. There was a pet store, with most of the visible animals being kittens, and a shop that was selling elaborate floral arrangements.

If he turned to his right, the tile was all stylishly mod black-and-white, and the shops got more mature but also a little weirder. The clothes tended toward the goth end of the spectrum; the jewelry was all spiked wristbands and rebellious-looking silver stuff. There was a huge comic book store, twice as large as some of the other shops, with action figures and dynamic posters filling the windows. Another storefront was advertising do-it-yourself science experiment kits and psychic paraphernalia.

Raz definitely had a hunch as to whose brain he'd accidentally ended up in this time.

He walked past one shop with a mirror in the front and caught sight of himself, and then he noticed it - he, too, had been affected by the pink/black split, but not in the way he would have immediately expected. Individual parts of his outfit had shifted into the two different colors, resulting in some bizarro patchwork. His goggles, for example, were almost entirely pink, at least around his eyes. So were the sleeves of his turtleneck, as well as a heart-shaped patch on the left of his chest, just above where his real heart ought to be. The rest of his torso, his narrow chest and stomach, had turned black. His shoes were unaffected, and the majority of his jeans - but as he twisted around in the mirror, Raz saw that the back pockets had turned black as well, along with - horrifyingly - a place on the front of his jeans that wasn't quite black, but was definitely darker than places just below it.

As awkward as the evidence was, it definitely sealed it: this was the Lili Blossom Shopping Mall, the astral manifestation of the two distinct sides of his girlfriend's mind. And all the things each side...liked.

The mall was currently devoid of customers, though, and only illuminated with the sparsest of lights. Some of the stores with more expensive items - Raz saw a fancy jewelry store on the pink side, and a place full of hi-tech electronics on the black side - even had large gates pulled down in front of them, sealing them off to the outside world. The only sounds he heard were the bubbling of the fountain, the faint meowings from the pet store, and his own boots clacking on the tile floor as he stepped gingerly through the place. Nothing was going on. Lili must have still been asleep.

Raz maneuvered around a tasteful seating area, built into the floor - plush, deep red sofas on the pink side, and mod ergonomic benches on the black side - and kept walking, heading to the other end of the mall, where he could see a light shining that was brighter than any of the others. At one point hallways split off down either side, the pink leading to a food court with healthful smoothie shops and sushi restaurants, the black leading to a movie theater playing foreign animated films and psychological thrillers. But Raz didn't bother exploring either of these hallways - he knew he'd find more of the same. No, he was still closing in on the light in front of him, and the closer he got, the more he realized that the store it was illuminating was the only store in the whole mall that existed on both the black side and the pink side.

As he finally approached it, he realized it was a bookstore, and the bright light was shining over a display holding a single open book.

Never having been good at fighting his curiosity, Raz stepped into the bookstore and up to the lit display, wondering what volume was so important that it alone would be isolated like this, directly down the center of Pink Lili and Black Lili. He peered in and read the left page of where it was opened, the pink side.

_Raz and I made a lot of progress today!_ it began, in sparkling pink gel pen. _First we were inside the brain of this turtle that Sheegor has, and we made a cake together. It smelled reeeeallly yummy and I wanted to eat some, but we had to give it to this turtle chef guy so he could make MORE yummy cakes! While we were doing that, Raz and I were talking about stuff that's happened to us. His life is soooo sad. But then he said...something...about us maybe someday...kyaah! I can't even think about it!_ The sentence was followed by four neatly-drawn heart doodles.

_Then we had to do this thing where we teleported, and Raz did it like 98% perfect even though like NO ONE has ever done it before! He's so good at everything. My arm got messed up a little but I'm trying not to think about it because I still can't believe Raz did it! Now we're going through the forest some more, trying to get to this Galochio guy and save Raz's dad. We hit this weird forcefield thing that was hard to walk through, so we stopped and went to sleep. I was sooooo tired. Goodnight, diary!_

"Diary?" Raz mouthed to himself. Uh-oh. This was probably not something he was ever meant to see. But if not, why would it be so prominently displayed in Lili's mind, there for anyone to see? So, despite how nosy it felt, Raz turned his eyes to the black side of the diary, with its greyer pages and its plain ballpoint pen.

_More impediments. Had to check in with Agent Nein about a Moral Compass, and resulting psychic meddling took forever. Left me hungry for cake, too._ The sentence was punctuated with a drawn-in frowny-face. _Spent a lot of time discussing things with Raz, though, which was...nice. He's got a lot of angst trapped in there, I can tell. Did something TOTALLY embarrassing in the process, both of us. I'll have to work that out with him later. After lots of cake, we managed to get out of there and keep pressing forward._

Impressively, Raz got us through Agent Nein's teleportation device without killing either of us. He lacks that finesse, after all. My arm, however, has been incapacitated, no thanks to him, and I don't know if it will get repaired, or how. After that, we ended up in this creepy forest. (No wildlife, but a couple of interesting plants and fungi!) We're progressing as well as possible but there's a psychic blockade in our way and we'll have to wait till tomorrow. -Lili

Raz tried to piece the two stories together. Both were obviously retellings of their day, but from totally different corners of Lili's mind. It was almost like there were two different people living in her head - the cutesy, girly girl who got excited about cake and seemed to have the bigger crush on him, and the dark and scientific one who cared mostly about accomplishing their mission. When you put the two together, you got the entirety of Lili.

If he thought about it that way, it really did seem to make sense.

But their conflicting opinions of him had gotten Raz even _more_ curious, to the point where there was one other thing that he really needed to know. Turning back in the diary quite a number of pages, Raz searched for one specific set of entries: the pages from June 20th, four years ago.

He read the pink side first.

_Diary, there is the CUTEST new boy at camp this year! He's totally never been here before but he can still do all sorts of awesome psychic things. Even Coach Oleander had a hard time getting into his head! His name is ~Razputin~ and I hope he likes me. I think maybe I'm going to make him a friendship bracelet tonight. He said he might have to leave camp soon because he's not really supposed to be here, so I want to do something for him right away. That way, maybe at least he'll remember me..._

The rest of the day was kind of boring. I flew out to camp and got stuck next to a really smelly guy on the plane, and then I just settled into my old bunk and went to the intro thing with Coach Oleander that I've seen like, eighty bajillion times. It was fun to see that Sasha and Milla are both back this year, though! The years where they're not here are really boring, because then Coach Oleander and Angela end up having to do everything, and I've taken their classes soooo many times. So Sasha and Milla, AND this cute Raz boy! This is going to be the best summer ever!!

Raz bit his lip, and giggled a little. Thinking back to their ten-year-old selves, and his adventures at Whispering Rock, was part embarrassing and part...well, _cute_. But then he shifted over to the other page, and he knew already it wasn't going to go as smoothly.

_The plane ride was AWFUL. I don't see why Dad can't just fly me out here in his own jet, it's not like he ever uses it for anything. Had to endure disgusting B.O. and crying babies instead. Completely unnecessary. Upon returning to WR I discovered that Elka Doom was trying to unpack her belongings into MY bunk. (My initials have been pyrokinetically burned into this bunk and everything. I've been sleeping here for FOUR SUMMERS. What the hell, tramp.) Used telekinesis and threw her on the floor, ha!_

Then at opening ceremonies...oh, man. Oleander was worse than ever - AMAZING considering his dumb speech has barely changed. Bobby Zilch kept sniggering behind me and I almost punched him in the face - I might have if Agents Nein and Vodello hadn't been there (what a relief, a little excitement). But out of nowhere, this creepy kid dropped in! TOTAL showoff. Acted like a hotshot just because he could put up a mental block strong enough to stop Oleander. Okay, so there are only a couple kids here at camp that can do that, but it's not like it's impossible. Blunt as his penetration is, and all. Creepy kid is named Raz and has a seriously annoying voice. I foresee Bobby kicking his ass a little. Of course, Bobby's pretty slow, so if this Raz kid gets kicked out as soon as they're saying he's gonna, he might not get a chance to. Ha!

(Need to get rid of sense of attraction to total dorks ASAP. It's not going to be good in the long run.) -Lili

Raz sighed, and shook his head. That was Lili, all right. Did she seriously think his voice was annoying? But the last sentence...there was still something there. He'd gotten under the skin of _both_ Lilis on the very first day.

"She really does like me," he murmured, placing his hand slowly over the heart-shaped spot on his sweater, in relief and a little bit of joy. And, still insatiably curious, Raz turned the page, wanting to read about the day she'd gotten kidnapped - the first time she'd called him her _boyfriend_, and the first time they'd kissed.

He'd barely taken the black side of the page between his fingers when the lights flickered on in the rest of the mall, the gates started rolling back into the ceiling, and faint, canned music started pumping into the space. The floor beneath him, pink and black tile alike, began to shake, and the diary snapped shut in front of him, nearly catching his fingers.

Lili was waking up.

Quickly, Raz looked everywhere for a way out, but there didn't seem to be any _doors_. The nearest teleportation creature was in the science shop, about five stores away - he'd never make it there in time. Raz found himself just running and running, desperate for a way to escape before she noticed -

But she noticed, and immediately deposited his astral projection back into his real-world body. With force.


	10. Unstoppable

(**AN:** I am so, SO sorry for the huge delay on this update! I went to an anime convention, for one, and then I immediately got myself enmired in another video game. I've also had sorority and academic obligations as usual, and yesterday was my birthday, so there's just been an awful lot going on! We're closing in on the end of the fic now, though, so hopefully I won't have to keep you hanging on for much longer. Please enjoy this chapter – it's my favorite!)

**CHAPTER 9: Unstoppable**

There was almost a physical sensation of hitting the ground as Lili kicked Raz back out into reality. He popped back into focus groaning and shaking his head in his spot on the ground - where presumably, he'd been asleep. Now, he was definitely awake.

"What the hell do you think you're thinking?" Lili demanded, voice shrill and awkwardly loud in the dead silence of the empty forest. "What the hell _were_ you thinking?"

"I didn't mean to - "

"You were in my _brain_. Without my permission. I don't even let you go into my _purse_ without my permission. What the hell!"

He tugged his goggles back up onto his forehead, making sure he could look her in the eye. "I swear, it wasn't on purpose! Look, this isn't the first time this has happened - at Mrs. Croshaw's place - "

"I bet you weren't trying to read _her_ diary!" Lili snapped. "You sure as hell didn't do _that_ by accident!"

"I promise you, I didn't read anything important - "

"How do you know what's important to me?" She was storming away from him, and she tried to gesture dramatically but he could see her cringe whenever she moved her left arm too abruptly. "I can't believe you. Just because you're a Psychonaut doesn't give you permission to go wandering around in the collective unconscious, looking for mental kicks!"

Raz scowled, rising to his feet to follow after her. "Hey, don't go making this about my job again. One of these days you're going to be a Psychonaut too, and then you won't have that excuse any more!"

"Maybe when _I'm_ a Psychonaut I'll actually have a sense of professional responsibility!"

"Hey, if you wanna check around inside my head, be my guest. _I_ don't have anything to hide."

Lili paused, furious, eyes squinted up and voice growling out from the very front of her mouth. "And _what_ exactly is that supposed to mean?"

"Well obviously if you're pulling such a freakout here you're trying to make sure I didn't see something, is that right? You're protesting a little much."

"I'm protesting because you don't just invade a girl's privacy like that!"

"Can't I do anything right today?" he groaned. "I'm sorry I'm such a _screw-up_ that you feel the need to scream at me in the middle of the forest!"

"You were _reading_ my _diary_, that's not a screw-up!"

"I was only reading about _me! I just wanted to know how the two sides went together!_"

"Reading any of it at all - _wait_." Lili had frozen suddenly, and the expression on her face was stuck between her previous rage and new, overwhelming awe. "_Both_ sides?"

"Well, yeah, duh. I would think you'd know how your own brain works. There's the black side on the right and the pink side on the left. And your diary was right there, open for the reading, you weren't hiding it too well - "

"You mean...when you went in there, it wasn't just all black?"

"No."

"And it wasn't just all pink?"

"I'm telling you, no."

"You actually saw the split down the middle, with the...the girl stuff _and_ the embarrassing nerd stuff and the kind of bipolar-looking diary?"

"Yeah, okay, I read your diary, but look, I'm _sorry_."

"Why the heck are you apologizing when you should just be _kissing_ me?" she cried, and flung her arms around his shoulders, her lips pressed unrelentingly to his. Raz was incredibly confused, but he wasn't too stupid to reciprocate, and they stayed that way for quite some time. By the time she felt it necessary to pull away from him he was levitating a couple inches from the ground, and he landed with a solid _thump!_ that startled him back into the situation.

"..._whoa_. Okay, not that I'm complaining or anything, but would you mind explaining what just happened here?"

Lili's face was flushed a little red, visible in the stark moonlight. "Any other person..." she began. "_Every_ other person, who's ever been in my brain. The doctors who tested me when I was little, trying to figure out if I was psychic or not - my dad - Sasha and Milla - _everyone_ but me...they've seen one of two things." She gestured a little with her right arm. "A shopping center for a cynical, fashion-conscious geek girl, and a locked-shut black diary..." Her left hand moved this time, unsteadily. "Or one for a trendy, girl-power princess girl, and a locked-shut pink diary. Black Lili or Pink Lili."

Raz, following her hand motions with his eyes, was finally starting to put the pieces together - especially since he'd been thinking in the same terms just moments earlier. "But I..."

"But _you_, Raz!" Lili said, smiling in what almost seemed like wonder. "Don't you get it? You saw how I _really_ am! With..._all_ of me." She took his hand in both of hers. "You're just awesome and _perfect_ like that."

Her words from their smaller argument right after the teleportation hit him again, but this time, they seemed one hundred percent honest, and Raz found himself hit with a feeling that was a little bit like hero-worshipped. The thoughts of adoration running through Lili's head were so loud that he could hear most of them, dancing over the back of his conscious with complete sincerity. The longer it went on, the more he started feeling as though he could do just about anything in the world. And with just his luck, the sun was beginning to creep up over the horizon, and he had a mission to accomplish.

"You're awake," he said. "I'm awake."

"I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep after _this_," Lili told him.

"Then we shouldn't waste any more time. We've gotta find us a gypsy."

-xxx-

Together, Raz and Lili approached the edge of Kasper's psychic barricade. Raz reached out and pressed his hand to it, and in the early morning mist it was even more freezing cold.

"We need a plan, here," he said.

"Maybe if we used our psychic shields? Our shield reflecting against his." Lili shrugged her good shoulder.

"Can you walk with yours?"

"Well enough."

"We should probably stick as close together as possible," said Raz. "That way we can sort of combine them together and push back harder."

Lili stepped closer to him and hooked her right arm around his waist. "Here goes nothing, then."

Raz felt her shield flare up around them, and he brought his up too, their pink and orange meshing in a sunburst that brought to his mind one of Milla's favorite dresses. Once they were completely in place, the two of them darted forward, only standing far enough apart to run unhindered. Slowly but surely their defensive energy started depleting, Lili's a bit faster than Raz's, and when both of their shield spheres flickered out they stopped, leaning on each other for stability as they recovered. Though he was already sweating from the exertion, his face was flushed red blotchily and he hadn't showered in a couple of days, Lili was smiling at him, and so Raz smiled too, even in his already tired state. They were so close to the end he could almost taste it.

As soon as they recovered they made another mad dash, following the Moral Compass between the slowly thinning trees and not daring to use energy on anything but running and projecting their shields. After the second burst Raz was even more winded - the further in they went, the thicker the "air" around them became - and they had to lean on a tree. Lili was clutching at her arm.

"It's getting worse," she said, and though she was acting on the outside like it was no big deal, Raz could hear her brain thinking otherwise. He wrapped around the back of her and put his hand on her injury, and thought _heat_. Activating his powers of pyrokinesis on the lowest setting possible, he transmitted the warmth from his mind, to his hand, to her arm. In the cold, oppressive environment of Kasper's barrier, it was the least he could do, and he felt her smiling before they continued onward again.

In their third venture forward they managed to cover less ground, mostly because the ground beneath them had begun to curve and they were now running uphill. Lili's arm and the exhaustion that was already setting in were also slowing them down. By the fourth run, Raz was really beginning to wonder if they were even approaching the end of the thick, stifling barricade. How deep of a layer could this possibly be?

After the fifth one, the air around them had actually begun to grow translucent with an unappealing grey-blue murk - a color Raz assumed would match Kasper Galochio's psychic energy. The trees around them were getting thinner still, and the ground beneath them was getting steeper. He and Lili stopped, leaning against a jutting crag of rock, for Lili to change her makeshift bandage.

As she tugged off the old one, Raz got a glimpse of the wound for the first time, and he had to choke back a gasp. It really was just as she had described. A shallow, two-inch-long groove in her left forearm was just...missing. He could see that it had been bleeding, but now it had mostly stopped, and it was just red and very painful-looking. He felt terrible.

"I swear, it's okay," she said, even though it wasn't. He helped her wrap it back up, but even once they'd done that, they didn't go anywhere.

"We must be nearly there," Raz said, trying to convince himself as much as Lili. "I didn't think it was possible for a force-field this strong to be this spread out."

"I'm glad we had those dream fluffs earlier," she said. "I could _feel_ this stuff digging into my psyche and driving me crazy. Especially once it...turned blue."

Raz nodded, with a bit of a shudder. The feeling was pretty intense, cold and foggy in the base of his skull, a freezing pressure. Nervously, he shifted his goggles into place over his eyes. For something that hadn't started off as a mission, it sure felt like one.

"You ready to go again?" he asked her, taking her good hand in his.

"As I'll ever be," Lili said, and they reached deep inside themselves for their psychic defenses, and pressed forward - and upward. They were heading up the side of a small peak, and though it wasn't too steep, it still slowed their progress. The only thing that made Raz feel better about it was that he was sure, completely _sure_, that the answers they were seeking lay at the top of it.

Then again, Raz didn't know if that made him feel better, or _worse_.

-xxx-

It was halfway through their seventh endeavor forward when, with a faint pop and deep gasping breaths, Raz and Lili made it out of the nearly opaque blue-grey smog of Kasper Galochio's mental barrier and into the proverbial eye of the hurricane. The sudden relief of pressure caused Raz to stumble forward and fall to his knees, panting heavily, anxious to regain his oxygen. As a result of that, Lili saw it first.

"Look," she said, through her rough coughs.

Raz craned his head up from the ground - and then, startled, shot to his feet and quickly whipped the goggles from his eyes so that he could stare at it unhindered. Standing on a grassy spot at the hill's very top, about fifteen feet ahead of them, was something so disturbingly familiar, yet so utterly alien, that he couldn't tear his eyes from it. It was a gypsy circus caravan.

Cautious, he started taking a couple of slow steps toward it. It didn't mirror his own too closely. The body of the wagon was shorter, wider, squat compared to the gangling tall one where he'd spent most of his early childhood. The accoutrements of the outside were a dull blue like the fog they'd jus passed through, instead of the reddish color Raz was familiar with. And there weren't nearly as many lights adorning the outside. But the whole concept of finding such a similar structure in such a foreign, hostile environment, well...

"This place gives me the creeps," said Lili aloud, right in synch with Raz thinking it to himself.

He turned to her. "Lili, I bet he knows we're here," Raz told her. "He's obviously got some psychic strength to him, especially considering this force-field he's put up. If he's not already out here trying to fight us off, he's definitely just waiting in there, biding his time. Waiting for us to go to him."

"_Duh_," said Lili, rolling her eyes. "So why aren't we kicking his ass yet?"

"That is a _very_ good question." So with the first sparks of their slowly recovering mental energy - fanned back to life with Raz's vengeance and Lili's unquenchable fierceness - the two of them stormed their second caravan wagon in three days.

Raz realized as he was bounding up the two small stairs that he really didn't know what to expect once he got inside. He'd been trying so hard to focus on all the other aspects of the scenario: he had to save his father. He had to save Jerry Croshaw, too. He was going to have to engage in psychic combat. He had to protect Lili. He was going to have to figure out which of his siblings had betrayed the circus. He hadn't slept well or eaten much so he had to be especially alert. He'd run all over the place dealing with Fannie, and Pokeylope and Sheegor, and Sasha's teleporter experiment, and he'd worked so hard to get here, and he had no idea what he was going into at all. So though he may have placed a little more emphasis on his last name than usual, Raz made the best dramatic entrance he knew how.

"I'm Agent Razputin Aquato, and I'm with the Psychonauts."

The inside of the caravan was dimly lit, and smoky from some kind of candle or incense. It really wasn't so different from Raz's own caravan at all. And in the center of the room was a small table with a figure sitting at it, in a straight-backed wooden chair. The person stood up and stepped closer to Raz and Lili, where they stood just barely inside the door. Soon distinct characteristics came into view, and both of them gasped.

"You're a _girl_?" said Raz, totally confused.

But Lili's gasp had been even louder. "_Clarisse_?"

Raz turned from the woman in front of them, who was smiling in a way he really didn't like, to his girlfriend. "Do you..._know_ her?"

"Raz," said Lili, her voice quaking, "this is my mother."


	11. Uncovered

(**AN:** Again, again, I apologize for the delay on the chapter! Sooner or later I will make it through a long fic without running out of steam. Curses! is not that fic. XD The end is approaching, though, so hopefully I won't be torturing you all like this for too much longer!)

**CHAPTER 10: Uncovered**

Even squinting, the woman in front of them didn't look much like Lili - certainly not enough for them to be related. She had the same slender figure and long, braided hair, but after that it mostly stopped. For one, she was quite tall, much taller than Lili would probably ever grow in her life. The loosely braided hair hanging down this woman's back was fine and ice-blonde, and her skin was pale, completely different from Lili's complexion. But even more than anything physical, more than the hair or skin or pale, narrowed eyes, was that this woman looked right at Lili without an ounce of care or compassion.

No one's _mother_ should ever have looked at them that way.

"Are you sure?" Raz babbled after a minute. As soon as the words left his mouth he knew what his answer would be. Lili was too nervous to be concealing her thoughts very well.

"Absolutely," she said faintly.

"But I thought you said she wasn't - "

"I didn't think she was, but I guess she could have - "

"You must get it all from - "

"I _know_, I just - "

"Are you two quite done?" said the woman. She tossed her head a little in irritation.

"Hey, hold your horses, lady!" Raz screamed suddenly. His next words were quieter, calmer, but no less intense. "I am tired, and hungry, and I haven't showered in two and a half days. My girlfriend is hurt, and my father could be dying _right now_. So I don't really care what you have to say - "

"You're just as they told me you would be, young Psychonaut," she said haughtily.

"Because - what did you just say?"

She merely laughed, a heartless-sounding noise. "I won't repeat it. You'll have to _think_ it out of me."

"Raz," said Lili softly, "I don't know her very well, but I know she gets like this. The only way to handle this is to just do what we came here to do."

"But she's your _mom_," Raz said, still so thrown about the whole situation.

"And he's _your dad_," she said.

He looked her in the eye. Behind her cute, trendy exterior, the Psychonaut flame of determination and drive was blazing in the back of her mind. Pink Lili and Black Lili. Two sides to the same coin. This was weird to her, too. But she was ready to do what she had to.

So he broke their eye contact by tugging his goggles into position, and he lifted from his backpack the small, multicolored psycho-portal.

"Shall we begin?" asked Clarisse, when she saw the object in his hand.

"_Let's_," said Raz, and he put it into place, and dove in.

-xxx-

The first sensation Raz felt upon entering the new mindscape was a distinct lurch of nausea. It rocked through his entire astral form - almost like the aftermath of a confusion grenade, but in his stomach instead of his head - and he ended up squinting his eyes shut behind his goggles in an effort to focus slowly on overcoming it. He could almost feel it working...and then the ground beneath him, which he'd assumed to be solid, pitched and rocked, sending his knees buckling. It was almost like a...

Like a _boat_.

Hesitantly, Raz cracked open one eye, looking down at his feet. His boots were planting not-so-solidly on a tiny river raft, made not of wood, but of what appeared to be hobbled-together tubes of lipstick. One of them was opened, and was leaving a trail behind them in the water in a bright coral-red color. As he began to come to grips with his surroundings, he opened both eyes and took a bigger look around. The river they were drifting down seemed to be made of normal water, but the forest on either riverbank (and Raz noted reluctantly that both were a good distance away from him, and he seemed to be drifting directly down the river's center) consisted of tall, thin makeup brushes of varying sizes, for powder and mascara and who knew what else. As he watched, they seemed to be the ones moving rather than Raz and his raft, and it was then that he lurched again, and ended up clinging to the nearest stable object.

Which happened to be Lili.

"Ahh!" he yelped when he realized it was a living person. Then he noticed exactly where the lower of his two hands had ended up, and yelped again.

"Not that I don't appreciate the attention, but would you mind getting your hand off my ass and _sitting down_?" she said, worming her hands in between his ribs and hers and pushing him backward. He took her advice half-unintentionally and planted himself down onto the surface of the raft, still trying to combat his seasickness.

"I feel like I took a grenade to the gut," he groaned, though he did feel a bit more stable now that he was sitting down.

"I can't say I blame you, this thing's been pitching like crazy," said Lili. "I tried to tug us back to shore with my telekinesis, but the force of the river must be too strong or something, because it didn't really work. Maybe if we worked together?"

"No," said Raz - he could already feel it. "With this much..._water_ around, my psychic abilities are pretty much - "

And then, even as much as he was shaking, Raz froze. Lili's telekinesis wasn't working. _Lili's telekinesis wasn't working._ Lili _was_ a telekinetic. If her strongest ability wasn't working, then that probably meant...

"Why don't you try again, first. S...see if maybe it's easier, now."

"Whatever, if you say so, but I can tell you it won't accomplish anything." Lili raised her right arm toward the riverbank and its strange vegetation, hoisting her wounded left arm very gingerly into place at her temple. Raz watched her focus, and try, but her psychic grip struggled and eventually fizzled out. It wasn't working at all.

"See what I mean? I can't get a good grip." Her statement was punctuated with a small groan as her injured arm dropped back into place. It looked like it was getting worse, but strangely, that wasn't the biggest problem any more. Not to Raz.

No, the biggest problem was that Lili's psychic failure in the middle of the river was exactly, _exactly_ like his own.

He had to try it out. Slowly, on his hands and knees, Raz leaned over the side of the raft, putting his face out above the river. Almost immediately a pale, watery hand slithered up from the rolling current and stretched toward him, but having been prepared for it, he jerked back and away. Then he looked up toward Lili.

"Come here, and look at this," he said, but his voice was faltering. "Our raft is uh...leaving a trail." She took the one step toward him that was necessary to cross the raft's surface and leaned down, too, examining the lipstick streak.

The same hand reached out for her, and would have had her too if Raz hadn't been ready for it. Before she could even scream, he yanked her back by her narrow hips and they both fell, with Lili landing on Raz's lap in the raft's center, her back pressed to his chest. They were both breathing a little heavily from the shock. After a minute, Lili started laughing a little in desperation, and slumped forward, though her good hand came up to rub affectionately at Raz's knee through the hole in his jeans.

"I guess...I guess I'm an Aquato now, too."

He reached around her stomach and hugged her back closer to him, chuckling with her, and pressed his face into the thickest part of her braid, at the base of her head. Even without his powers working, he could tell that she was losing it. He was losing it a little himself. He brushed softly at her stomach with his thumb, the slightest movement, trying to be comforting. Her laugh became a little more genuine, a little less frazzled, and she turned around to sit on her knees in front of him.

"That...tickles," she said, and then she pushed his goggles up away from his eyes, and he let her, because he knew she was going to kiss him. They stayed together for several moments, the soft press of each other all the comfort they really needed. Eventually he pulled away, though he didn't quite want to.

"I'm...glad you're an Aquato now," he told her.

She smiled. "Me too."

-xxx-

The raft moved onward down the river of Clarisse's mind, at a pace that wasn't swift but wasn't too slow either. Having given up on accomplishing anything immediately, Raz was sprawled out on his back, almost too tall to fit on the raft comfortably. Lili was sitting up on the edge of it, cross-legged, staring out at the (only slightly) closer of the two banks.

"What do you think we should _do_?" she asked, almost to herself.

Raz answered anyway. "We're stuck on this thing no matter what we do," he said. "I'm just gonna operate under the assumption that whatever we're heading toward is going to be downstream, and we'll get there when we get there."

"I can't take all this _waiting_," Lili scowled.

"Me neither."

There was silence, except for the call of a distant bird and the gushing of the river. It took a good while for Raz to work up the courage and energy to ask his next question.

"So...your _mom_?"

It took another good while for Lili to manage to answer him. "...Yeah," she finally said. "She...well, I told you, we're not close. I don't really know what she's been doing since I saw her last. I did know that she was a makeup artist of some kind...so this really does kind of make sense. The lipstick, and all."

"Maybe that's why I've always hated it when you wear too much makeup," he said. It was supposed to be a joke, but neither one of them was laughing.

"Why her?" Lili wondered softly. "Why not Kasper?"

"I think our best bet would be to find a memory vault," said Raz. "She's obviously not going to tell us herself." He rolled over onto his stomach, staring at the river retreating behind them and the path their raft had taken, and exhaled in an exhausted, exasperated way.

"Well, unless one of them happens to be drifting downstream past us, I don't see that happening any time soon either - "

"_Like the one right there?_" he exclaimed. Startled, Lili leapt to her feet in a way that almost threatened to capsize the raft. Much more carefully, Raz rolled over and stood up just in time for a large, squealing memory vault to come drifting toward them on its back, stubby legs flailing desperately in the air. With extreme effort they managed to get it onto the raft, but it was so heavy that the structure quickly started slipping under the water.

"How are we going to open it?" said Raz, with a note of mild panic in his voice. "I don't really have a psychic punch going on right now!"

"Ugh, give me a second," said Lili. With Raz holding it still, she pressed her ear to the front of the vault and started turning the combination lock this way and that, and in a few seconds it had popped open. She snatched the film roll from the inside and then kicked the vault off the side of the raft, where it fell into the river and promptly sank. Their raft bobbed with the loss of weight, but returned more stably to the surface.

Raz blinked at her. "How'd you do that?"

"...Years of sneaking out of the house?" She smiled nervously, and Raz didn't quite believe her, but he wasn't going to push it. Not now. Instead, they huddled together and examined Clarisse's memory.

-xxx-

She was haughtily fleeing the Zanotto household, at the driver's seat of a very nice-looking car.

But then later, in her fancy hotel room, she was crying a little to herself, and around her various items were levitating on their own.

One of them was a large makeup palette, which she eyed longingly.

A stocky but good-looking man was approaching her, talking to her persuasively.

He mentioned a circus, in need of a makeup artist.

She was afraid, but he assured her he would treat her just like everyone else.

She was going with him, and she didn't seem upset any more.

-xxx-

They snapped back out of the memory, and took a split second to let it sink in.

"So she really _is_ a psychic too!"

"I guess part of me always figured she'd have to be," said Lili. "I mean, the gene for psychic abilities is extra-recessive, right?"

"I'm the only one, out of my siblings," Raz agreed.

"So she was scared," she said softly. "She didn't want to be a psychic. She just wanted to be like everyone else."

"That's why she married a man who she thought was non-psychic."

"And then when they had me..."

They fell silent. Raz could see the anxiety in Lili, and deliberately skipped past it.

"Galochio got her in a moment of weakness," he said. "And that last shot...was it just me, or was that insanely blurry, and not quite..._right_?"

"I thought it was just me!" said Lili. "It _did_ look totally weird!"

"Lili, he did something to her mind," Raz said, and somehow, he knew as he said it that it was true. "It really is Galochio who's to blame in all of this. We have got to get to the bottom of this, and help your mother get away from him."

"He probably sent her because they thought I wouldn't be able to confront her, because she's my mother," said Lili, her energy and determination building. "But they were wrong."

"We're going to win," Raz swore. "For my dad, and for your mom."

"Yeah," said Lili. "And then I'm going to _kick Galochio's ass._"

But just as the words left her mouth, the river curved sharply ahead of them. As they rounded the bend, the current picked up speed, and soon they were much more out of control than they had been previously. The water in front of them was dotted with dangerous-looking rocks (in the form of hard chunks of pigment, staining the water in pinks and golds), and far in the distance, Raz could see a place where the river forked off in two different directions.

He swallowed nervously. "If he doesn't kick our asses first."

-xxx-

They were going to have to find a way to steer.

"What I wouldn't give for some telekinesis right now!" Lili fretted, tugging anxiously on the end of her half-unraveled braid. "Not even telekinesis! Not even something that basic!"

"I hate to say it, but our powers aren't gonna be any use to us for now," said Raz. "All we can really do with our brains is _think_."

The raft pitched in the current, and Lili fell to her hands and knees, crying out as weight landed on her injured arm. Raz knelt down to help her, sliding his hand across the raft's surface in the process. The open tube, lipstick streaking out behind them, retracted back into itself a little, and the loss of resistance caused a slight increase in the raft's speed.

"Hang on," said Raz, "hang on!" He rolled the tube in the opposite direction, and the stick emerged further, slowing them down. Lili's eyes lit up as she caught on.

"Open all of them!" she cried, and Raz was one step ahead of her, tugging off the shiny black and gold lids to their seven lipstick tubes. They ended up with their coral-red, a deeper crimson, two soft pinks, a dark metallic maroon color, an orangey-peach, and - all the way on the left - an electric blue. All six other colors were all the way rolled down. Raz moved to open all of them, working outward from their first one in the middle. Anything to slow them down.

Lili, meanwhile, was actually looking ahead. "Raz - "

"I know, I know, I'm working on it, gimme a second - "

"No, Raz, I mean - "

"There's seven of them and it's hard to do without telekinesis, okay?"

"Raz, you're gonna need to figure out how to turn!"

Raz himself turned, craning his neck around to face forward, and finally saw what Lili had seen - they were heading straight for a sparkling purple "rock" in the middle of the river. To their left, more rocks - they needed to hook right. But how?

"Maybe if I..." Raz worked to close up all the tubes on the righthand side of the raft, but that produced the total opposite results - the raft curved to the left, the side with less resistance moving faster. He barely had time to reverse the process before they collided with the jut of pigment, and they squeaked by with the barest margin.

"Watch out!" Lili cried.

"Hey, this is hard to do by myself, you know!"

"Think about that the next time you disassemble my arm!"

"Am I ever gonna live that down?"

"Left!" Raz rolled up the crimson, orange, and maroon tubes, and the raft swiveled to the left just in time to avoid a makeup brush log drifting in the current. They came fearfully close to spinning around completely backward before Raz corrected the vessel and set them straight again.

"Remind me again just _how_ you got your oarsman badge?"

"Sasha likes to help me cheat?"

"Right!"

"Yeah, otherwise we would never have scored that Moral - "

"No, _right_! As in the cardinal direction?"

Raz hastily rolled them to the right, illuminating the water with the nightlight-glow blue.

"Geez, it's like some deranged video game!"

"Sorry, Razputin, but your father is in another brain?"

"Y'know, it'd be great if maybe you could shift closer to the center of the raft - balance things better - "

"Bank us left first, _hard_!"

Raz cranked the raft to the left again, cutting it the closest yet. After that, however, they hit a relatively calm stretch, and Lili was able to walk on her knees over to the middle of the raft, though she stayed slightly to the right to even out where Raz sat slightly to the left. Raz slowed it down as much as he could and took what almost passed for a breather. This was ridiculous!

"I hope my dad didn't have this much trouble pursuing...whoever it was."

"I'm pretty sure we're the only people who've ended up riding a raft made out of _lipstick_," said Lili. She paused, studying on them. "I kind of like that one pink color."

"Less Pink, more Black," Raz said, only half-teasing.

"Fork's coming up," said Lili. "Left or right?"

"You pick, you're the navigator."

Lili squinted into the distance. "The left side looks like it has more obstacles. And if we go to the right, I think we'll have a greater chance of making it to the bank - if we decide we need to, rather than just following the river till we reach the end."

"Right it is, then." Raz shifted a couple of the lipstick tubes to angle them vaguely in that direction. They were finally cutting some of the crazy speed they'd built up, and the raft almost seemed manageable. Raz reached over to Lili to stroke at her bandaged arm, just below where he knew her gash to be.

"I just can't tell you how sorry I am, for this," he mumbled.

"You know I only pick on you because I like you, dork," she said, and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

And in the split second when neither of them was looking, the raft collided with a silver-blue rock, and split in two.


	12. Unavoidable

(**AN: **Thank you all SO MUCH for being so patient with my sparse updates!! I'm amazed that I continue to get faves and author alerts on this when I am slacking so much. So, to repay all you fabulous people, I've decided to cash in my buffer chapter. As such, I'll probably be giving you Ch. 12 before the week is out. And I know I keep saying this and chapters keep coming, but I really do mean it when I say that this fic is approaching the end. 15 chapters max, I think, although saying that will probably render it untrue. WE'LL SEE. For now, enjoy chapter 11.)

**CHAPTER 11: Unavoidable**

Raz could only watch in horror as the three tubes of lipstick Lili was riding on drifted further and further away from him at an alarming rate. The bounce off the rock had propelled her a little faster, on top of the loss of over half the raft's mass. Meanwhile, the four Raz was still sitting on were slower, and being carried more and more to the left by the raging current.

"Lili!"

"It's okay, it's okay," Lili said, though everything in her voice and expression told him it wasn't. "Let's just keep riding the current and we'll get to the end of the river. We can get back together then."

"What if it forks again?" Raz shouted.

"We do our best, now come _on_!"

Raz wasn't having any of it, though. "I'm coming for you, Lili. You're not going to be able to steer without your arm, you're - " But he fell suddenly, ominously silent.

Lili missed it at first. "I'll just have to do the best I can with what I've got. It's worked for us so far! And besides, this side of the river didn't have nearly as many obstacles to avoid - "

"That's because it didn't have _nearly as much river!_" Raz screamed, voice cracking with its hoarseness. He pointed desperately, and Lili turned over her shoulder and finally saw it: the huge, raging waterfall not thirty feet downstream of Lili.

She shrieked. "Oh my freaking _god_, Raz!"

"Don't worry!" he cried to her. To himself he mumbled, "Come on, Razputin, you can do this. You're an Aquato, you can _do this_." Even without his psychic abilities, he was still an acrobat, wasn't he? The next rock he got close enough to, Raz angled his chunk of raft as hard to the right as it would go, then sprung off to balance on one foot on the tiny obstacle. As the raft whipped past him, gaining speed without a passenger, he leapt up and flipped back onto it, landing hard on his knees and adding even more momentum. He was quickly losing his ability to steer, but he was right on target, heading straight for Lili's raft. If he could just get beyond her, onto that rock right on the waterfall's edge, he could grab her as she swung past - and then their only problem would be making it back to shore. At the very least they could huddle there for a while on the off-chance that anyone might walk by and save them -

Raz closed up all his lipstick tubes and just barely rocketed past Lili without colliding with her. "Just hang on!" he yelled.

"I'm hanging as hard as I can!" she shouted back.

Closer...closer..._yes!_ Raz bounded from his raft to the last jade-green rock before the precipice, and shot out his hand for Lili. "Grab on!" he screamed.

She flew by in an instant, and he reached out for her...and gripped hard onto her injured arm.

"_Aahhh!_" she yelped in pain, her arm recoiling out of Raz's reach by gut reaction alone. As she slipped past him, she seemed to realize what she'd done, and a look of silent disbelief and panic washed over her face. She didn't even scream as she tumbled over the edge of the waterfall, plummeting to the torrents below in what almost seemed like slow motion.

He did.

"_LILI!_" he roared, louder even than the raging falls, and before he knew what had overtaken him, he leapt from his rock and dove headfirst over the side after her, arms still stretching out as if he might catch her. By the time he could make sense of where he was, she'd already fallen into the spray, and by the time he hit the water, he knew they were both doomed.

He flopped under the current like a rag doll, barely cognizant of his surroundings. He knew mostly that it was dark, and wet, and cold, and that his chunk of raft had flown by him at one point and left only a brilliant streak of blue that seemed very, very far away. The roar of the waterfall crashing was thunderous in his head, and in his current state of psychic inhibition, it was almost enough to keep him from being able to hear his own thoughts. The lack of oxygen probably wasn't helping either.

Raz knew he was dying. He figured Lili was probably dying too - the curse had spread to her, and even if it hadn't she still couldn't swim with her hurt arm. More and more he wanted to blame himself, but if he looked at the big picture, there really was simply nothing that could be done. He hadn't asked for it any more than she had, and now they were both going to die here in Clarisse's brain. And this wasn't going to be like any other mental death that merely deposited you back into the real world, either. This was the mind of an enemy - and she wasn't even the one doing the killing. If anything was his murderer, it was Galochio's accursed..._curse._

Curses, Raz thought faintly, and he couldn't figure out if he meant it as an expletive, or merely as a commentary on how his life had been going recently. Not in his current state. In his current state, he couldn't even figure out which way was up and which way was down. All he knew was that he thought he saw a faint glimmer of pink out of the corner of his eye - but when he turned to face it, it was gone, yanked out of his field of vision. He didn't know if it was actually Lili, or just another broken tube of lipstick or glistening pigmented pebble, but he was going to pretend it was Lili after all, just so he could have seen her one last time.

The thought hit the pit of his stomach rather hard and suddenly. _That was the last time I'll ever see her._

Then, in quite the same fashion of yanking, he himself was jerked away from the water, and thrown coughing and sputtering onto a hard, but springy surface - the bank. Not just a rock, but actual solid ground. Raz tugged his goggles away from his eyes and rubbed at them, then coughed and sputtered some more, discharging all the water he'd inhaled. He could hear Lili doing the same.

He could also hear a loud, slightly irritating voice talking to them. "Geez, you're like fifteen years old and you dunno how to swim? What the heck is wrong with you? Ain'tcha never been to summer camp?"

Raz sat back on his knees and looked up to see a boy who couldn't be too much older than he was, very skinny in stature and with chin-length reddish hair that looked an awful lot like his own - except this guy _had_ managed to get his bangs to lay flat with the rest of it. And very suddenly, Raz knew who this guy was. As soon as he could speak, he said it.

"...Jerry Croshaw?"

"Hey, yeah, that's me," he said, seemingly puzzled that Raz knew his name. "So who the heck are you?"

-xxx-

Raz hefted himself to his feet, keeping his eye on Jerry. He still wasn't quite sure what he thought of him - maybe if he kept him talking he'd be able to figure something out. But first, he reached down to help Lili to her feet, making sure to aim for the arm that wasn't hurt this time. His outstretched hand met empty air.

"You breathin' okay now, y'think?" said Jerry, his arm sprawled across Lili's shoulders. She was still coughing a little, and favoring her bad arm, but she nodded her response.

Okay, that made up Raz's mind. He didn't like this guy after all. Telekinetically, he tugged Jerry's arm away from his girlfriend's bare skin, letting it drop to his side with a thud. _Damn_ it felt good to use his mind like that again. He took Lili's good hand instead.

"What about your brain?" he asked her. "I think I'm doing okay."

_What do you think?_ she shot back telepathically, and he grinned.

"Hey, you still haven't answered my question," said Jerry, pointedly, from behind the two of them. "Who _are_ you?"

"My name is Raz," he told him, turning over his shoulder to make irritable eye contact. "This is my _girlfriend_ Lili."

"And how exactly did _you_ know who _I_ was?"

"We've made friends with your grandmother," said Lili. "She told us we might find you here."

"Gramma?" he echoed, his obnoxious demeanor waning a little. He placed a hand on Lili's shoulder, leaning in toward her in an effort to at least look sensitive. "Is she doing okay?"

"She is _now_, no thanks to you," said Raz. "You're lucky she loves you so much or we wouldn't even be bothering with you right now." Raz psychically yanked Jerry's arm from Lili's shoulder again, being a little rougher this time.

The other boy made a face at him this time, sensing something was amiss but still not quite able to identify it. "And why exactly _are_ you botherin', then?"

"I guess in theory we're here to rescue you, though it's not exactly our prime objective."

"Do I look like I need to be _rescued_?" asked Jerry.

"You don't really seem to be handling the situation very well yourself."

"And whaddya think you're rescuin' me _from_?"

"Being trapped in the mind of a psychic," said Raz, "who in turn is being manipulated by an even more powerful psychic, who also happens to have it out for me and my entire family."

"_Psychics_," Jerry groaned, rolling his eyes like it was a tired joke someone kept telling. "I just got more talk about these psychics. I still don't even understand what the heck that _means_. I know, I know," he said, "like, what it means in general, 'n' stuff. But I don't know how that fits in in real life. What does it mean if you're a friggin' _psychic_, anyway?"

"It means I can do _this_," said Raz, but before he could think up something good to _think_, Lili reached out both her physical arm and her weak pink psy-fist.

"Would you just knock it _off_?" she said. "I know you like to act all tough, because you're stupid boys, but I think we need to focus on getting the hell out of here first." She turned to Raz. "Obviously our plan was wrong. We _can't_ get to the end of the river because it doesn't really...end." Raz looked beyond her and saw that she was right - the waterfall spilled into a new swathe of river, narrower but just as impenetrable as the first, and not too far off he could see a second waterfall beyond which the landscape didn't appear to continue. "So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that our _real_ objective is at the _mouth_ of the river, and we're actually, y'know, _totally at the wrong end_. We've got some ground to make up, so we should probably get going."

"Don't mean to burst your bubble, but climbing those rocks is _hard_," Jerry said, seeming to address Lili and Lili alone. He pointed at the craggy cliff over which the waterfall poured, a good distance away from their current position. "I've tried it a couple times and barely made it more than halfway or so. We're gonna need some help."

"We could levitate," said Raz, also speaking only to Lili. "We'd have to carry _him_, but it could work."

"Let's just get over there first, and see what it's like, before we start making any brilliant plans," said Lili, shooting Raz a look.

"Absolutely," said Jerry, smiling warmly at Lili. "Ladies first, and all."

"Oh, so kind of you to lead the way," Raz retorted. The two of them exchanged a glare, but eventually Jerry headed forth, and Raz and Lili fell behind him, following closely through the dense, soggy grass.

_Stop being such a bonehead,_ Lili thought to him almost immediately.

_What?_ he thought back.

_Oh, please. The intense, insane jealousy thing would almost be cute if it weren't so freaking annoying._

Raz scowled. _It's obvious we're together and he's still flirting with you! And clearly he doesn't think too highly of psychics, which makes that even _less_ okay because -_

Relax, she insisted, cutting him off. _He's kinda cute, but only because he looks like you. And..._

And what?

And he only sees me as Pink, she finished, rolling her eyes as if the mere act of admitting it were embarrassing. But when Raz thought on that for a moment or so, it only made him smile.

"Okay," he said aloud, "but that still doesn't mean I have to like it."

"What the heck are you _talking_ about back there?" asked Jerry.

"Super-secret special psychic stuff that only psychics can know about," Raz shot back a little too quickly.

Jerry just chuckled again, mostly to himself. "_Psychics_. I keep hearing it no matter what I do."

A question suddenly formed in Raz's mind, but it was out of Lili's mouth before he could manage to say it himself. "Jerry...where else did you hear about psychics, anyway?"

"Well, my gramma used to mention them every once in a while...back when I was in the _real_ world," he said.

"Oh, yeah," said Raz. "I guess that makes sense."

"That," said Jerry, "and it's one of the words that the elephant can write."

Raz actually stopped walking out of surprise. "Excuse me, _what_?"

"The weirdest part about this whole thing," said Jerry. "A big, plaid, pink and purple elephant. Just wanderin' around."

Lili stopped too, and turned to speak to Raz. "Okay, I know she ended up with a circus, but even that sounds a little weird. This whole mental world is cosmetics - why would there just be an _elephant_?"

Raz was inclined to agree with her, as he wracked his brain for any possible explanation. The circus connection was there, but Lili was right - it definitely wasn't strong enough for such an intense manifestation, and why would it be _plaid_? Nothing else in Clarisse's brain was in a color that it wouldn't be normally. Unless...oh. _Oh._

"I think," Raz said slowly, still unsure if he was even getting this right, "that it's probably an Either."

"A _what_?" said Jerry, looking at him like he was crazy.

"An Either," Raz said again. "An Elephant In The Room. Agent Greissmeyer, before he got to the RMPH, he was part of a team that was doing some weird research on this phenomenon. Sasha and I talked a little bit about it too. It's like...in some people, if they've got something dark, terrible, and totally secretive about themselves, but a ton of other people manage to find out - so lots of people know about it, and they know they know, but they're all pretending not to know - ugh, it's hard to explain without going in circles. But all the tension from not acknowledging...whatever it is starts to build up in the person's brain."

"There's an elephant in the room," said Lili. "I should have known the expression would come from something literal."

"You realize this makes absolutely no sense, right?" said Jerry. Raz completely ignored him.

"So your mom's Either is probably coming from - "

"The widespread but completely taboo knowledge that she's a psychic!"

"Hang on, this crazy person is your _mother_?"

"_Shut up_."

"So wait, what good does that do us?" said Lili. "So there's an Either, so what?"

"Hey, I grew up in a circus," said Raz, "I _know_ elephants."

"_So_?" said Jerry.

"_So_," said Raz, rounding on him in irritation, "I bet an elephant could climb us up that cliff."


	13. Unsteady

(**AN:** See, look? I really do love you guys, I swear.)

**CHAPTER 12: Unsteady**

It was almost embarrassing how long the three of them managed to keep walking before it occurred to Raz that he had absolutely no idea where they were going. He made a face at Jerry's back, then turned over his shoulder and made a similar one to Lili.

"Um, where are we going?"

She, too, made a face, and not a very reassuring one at that. "_I_ don't know. I was following you!"

"Well I was following _him_," said Raz, nodding his head at Jerry.

"Hey, I don't know where this elephant is any more than you guys do," he said, growing defensive. "It comes and goes as it darn well pleases, sometimes I don't see it for weeks."

The way he said _weeks_ sort of hit Raz all of the sudden. "Weeks? How long have you been...uh, in here, anyway?"

Jerry shrugged. "Don't really know any more. Kinda stopped thinkin' 'bout it after a while."

_Damnit, somehow I'm actually starting to feel bad for this jerk,_ Raz thought to Lili.

_Ugh, don't make me call you a bonehead again._ But then he felt her head spark with realization, and she spoke her next idea aloud. "Well, if you can't find the elephant, do you think you could find some _part_ of the elephant?"

"Say what?"

Raz was catching on. "Yeah, yeah! Something connected to the Either in some way - something it created, or anything it left behind."

"What good is that gonna do ya?" Jerry wondered, skeptical.

"If we can get at something connected to the Either, we can use our clairvoyance to see what it sees. Then maybe we could figure out where it is, and not have to waste our time wandering aimlessly looking for it."

"Are you familiar enough with this place that you'd be able to find the elephant if we described something to you?" Lili asked him.

"I guess I could try," said Jerry.

"Great. Lead the way - for real this time."

"Oh, don't worry," said Jerry. "Once we get close enough, you'll be able to tell exactly where we're headin'."

"Really? How?" Lili asked, but Raz had the answer already, without even having to read Jerry's mind. And it wasn't an answer he was really looking forward to, either. They said it - and winced - in unison.

"...It'll smell."

-xxx-

"I'll have you know I am _not_ touching elephant poop," Lili swore, as they trudged through the thick makeup-brush forest in the direction of...exactly that.

"Hey, it's practically your turn," said Raz. "I cleaned up after elephants for three years of my _life_."

"So why should one more time make any difference for you?" she said, practically pleading. "Come _on_. You're a better clairvoyant than I am anyway - "

"Waitasecond," said Jerry, "you're actually gonna have to _touch_ this crap for it to work?" He laughed, a sound that was almost ominous to the two psychics. "Man, I'm sorry."

"Hey, don't act like it's gonna be _me_ touching it," said Raz.

"Geez, are you really enough of a punk to make a pretty girl touch old poop?"

"Yeah, are you?" Lili echoed.

"Oh, now you're on his side," said Raz, huffing and crossing his arms.

"I'm on the side of whoever is _not_ going to make me stick my hand in - "

She fell silent, and her nose began to twitch. Raz could smell it too. They were...getting close.

"In _that_," she finished, practically groaning. "Oh, _gross_."

"Almost there," said Jerry. "...Not that I really need to tell ya."

They continued to walk, barely even able to speak for a while as the smell got incrementally worse. Soon enough all three of them were pinching their noses shut.

"You do it," Lili said to Raz with an air of finality.

"No, _you_ do it!"

"Oh for chrissakes, can't ya just rock-paper-scissors or something?"

Raz looked at Lili, shrugging a little, and finally she rolled her eyes and consented. "But no mind reading!"

"Hey, same to you!"

"Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!"

Above his head, Raz's psychic fist swung down in exactly that - a fist. Unfortunately, Lili's did the same, nearly knocking into his. A tie on rock.

"Rock, paper, scissors, shoot!" they tried again. This time both mental hands threw out scissors.

"What the heck are you two _doin'_?"

"Rock, paper, scissors, _shoot_!" This time, there was no mistaking it - Raz was victorious, having stuck to scissors while Lili shifted to paper, most likely hoping for another tie and a clean slate.

"Ooh, I hate you. Best two out of three?"

"That _was_ three. Your chance is up," Raz told her, smiling perhaps a little more than he should have been. "It'll only be for a couple seconds, and there's running water right over there. The smell is the worst part anyway."

"If the two of ya have finally reached a decision back there," said Jerry, "...we're here."

He was right. They'd reached a clearing in the woods, the damp and vaguely sparkling grass spreading out in front of them. The sun was shining down into the meadow, finally there to help along Raz and Lili drying out from the river. If it weren't for the smell it actually would have been quite pretty.

The smell, and the thick substance it was emanating from, sitting in a pile at the center of the clearing.

Lili made a horrified face. "It's _pink_? Why the hell is it _pink_?"

"A pink elephant poops pink poop?" Raz said, half-questioning it himself.

"Yep, there you have it," said Jerry, gesturing. "Do your crazy psychic stuff or whatever." He sat on a fallen brush-log, turning away from the pile of pink, eyes watering from the stench. Raz turned to Lili, giving her as much of an expectant smile as he could manage. She grimaced, and slowly trudged her way over to it. With the barest touch of her index finger, she began to clairvoyantly read the horrible substance.

"It's eating something, somewhere...I can hear the river rushing, so it must be close - oh! It turned its head away from its food, up into the sky...there are some birds flying overhead, weird pink ones. Now it's eating again. It's just in the forest, I can't really tell where it is at all." She jerked her hand away from the stuff as if it had been burned, shuddering. "Well that was a load of help."

"_Load_ is right," Raz joked. "Come on, let's get away from - "

He was interrupted by the squawking of some birds, a noise so loud it startled Jerry to his feet and set all three of them looking toward the sky. It was five crow-sized, bright pink birds, parrots of some kind, flying overhead in the direction of the denser forest. "That's them!" shouted Lili, following them across the sky - but tracing their path in reverse with his own eyes, Raz came to a very depressing realization.

"Then the Either is on the other side of the river."

-xxx-

The three teenagers stood on the bank of the river, staring out past the waterfall. The bubbling of the obnoxious barrier of water might almost have sounded pleasant if it hadn't been exactly that. As it was the rushing was just irritating and loud - but not so loud that Raz couldn't hear himself think. Psychics could always hear themselves thinking. And he was thinking. There was Lili, anxious about exploring her estranged mother's psyche. Raz himself, desperate to just get to the end of this and save his father.

And that stupid Jerry guy who had yet to be very helpful.

"Any brilliant ideas about crossin' that thing?" he said after a minute.

"You mean you're not brimming with suggestions?" Raz shot back, refusing to even look at him where he stood on the other side of Lili.

"Y'all are the _psychics_," said Jerry. "I thought y'all were supposed to be good at _thinkin'_."

"I _am_ trying to think if you two would just _shut up_!" Lili snapped. She rolled her eyes and turned her back to the raging river, crossing her arms and just sitting down in midair. She looked an awful lot like Milla, Raz thought, and when he turned back to the river, it got him thinking some more. He was a Psychonaut, wasn't he? What would Agents Nein and Vodello be doing that Agent Aquato couldn't seem to manage?

"They would just levitate themselves across this freaking river," he muttered to himself. Milla was an expert levitator, and even she hadn't been able to work with him enough to overcome it. Sasha was a brilliant psychic researcher, but time and time again his brain tumbler had accomplished nothing. Even Sheegor couldn't figure it out, and brains were almost all she knew. It couldn't be a river of lava, or acid, or sharp pointy things. It had to be the most harmless, most horrible thing of all.

Raz huffed out a loud sigh, and Jerry shot him a look. "Well, I dunno about y'all two, but I'm about to just start swimming."

"Lucky you," said Raz.

"I'm just sayin'," said Jerry, tucking his hands behind his head and strolling a little bit away from the two psychics. He hopped up on a fallen log at the forest's edge and started walking its length with remarkably good balance and form. "I may not be Mr. Circus Freak who can talk to the elephants, but at least _I_ know how to swim."

Lili rounded on him, finally fed up. "Don't you _dare_!" she cried, angrier than Raz was used to seeing her. "I don't care what you have to say about psychics or my mother but don't you _dare_ call my _boyfriend_ a circus freak!" In her fury the log Jerry was standing on began to jerkily rise into the air. Impressively, he remained standing on it, rocking a little, but poised.

He even managed to take a couple of steps toward her. "Hey, crazy lady, you wanna put me down?"

And quite suddenly, she did - because Raz had gasped, and Lili had gasped in the same instant, and the fallen brush and Jerry clattered to the ground of the riverbank.

"_That's it!_"

-xxx-

"So lemme get this straight," said Jerry, darting along behind Raz as he maneuvered back out of the thick forest and toward the bank of the river with the longest, sturdiest fallen makeup brush log he could find floating over his head. Raz could feel Jerry as he continually darted out of the way so his head didn't get bashed in with the unwieldly load. The load wasn't really that unwieldly, but he sure wasn't going to tell Jerry that.

"What's there to get?" said Raz.

"You're gonna use your..._psychic powers_ - "

"Which we _do_ have and I _do_ know how to use correctly - "

" - to float a buncha giant powderpuff stick trees over this river like a bridge...so we can go ride a pink plaid elephant _up a cliff_ to have a throwdown with your girl's _mom_?"

"And the evil psychic puppeteer that's got her in his power, who put the curse on us that's making us have to make this bridge in the first place," Lili added as they approached her. She swung out her pale mental grasp to take the log from Raz, holding all three of the ones they'd collected almost effortlessly. She really was an excellent telekinetic.

"Y'all are itchin' to get yourselves killed, is all I'm saying," said Jerry. "I've been in here a while, away from the real world, but at least I'm not dead."

"Maybe that's good enough for a weasel like you," said Raz, "but I've gotta get out of here. I've got people to save and curses to break." _And my whole family to confront on it in the end,_ he added to himself. Even juggling the pieces to their bridge, Lili picked up on it too.

_Don't worry,_ she assured him telepathically. _We've made it this far._

"I'm not a weasel," said Jerry. "I just don't think this is one of those plans that's so crazy it just might work. I think it actually is crazy."

"I don't see you with any better ideas," said Raz.

"Besides, you've got the best end of the deal here," Lili said. "You're going off our brain power, and all you have to do is balance on the logs and not fall off. You seemed to be able to do that pretty well earlier."

"Hey yeah," said Raz, "you had some pretty good form there."

"Don't look so surprised," Jerry said, on the defensive. "I _did_ have six 'r seven years of serious dance training before I got trapped up in here."

Raz really _did_ look surprised at that. "No way."

"Yeah, _way._ Geez, for carnie mindreaders you sure do a lot of judgin' books by their covers."

Raz studied on him, seeing really easily how Jerry's physique - similar to his own as it was - would lend itself to classical dancing. And suddenly, fleetingly, he remembered the old battered teddy bear that Fannie Croshaw had been clinging so desperately to in her madness: the one that was dressed like a little ballerina.

"I'm not a carnie mindreader," Raz said after a moment. "The psychic stuff came separate from the circus stuff. In the circus I was an acrobat."

"Oh yeah?"

Raz answered him with a backflip that launched him clean over Jerry's head to a position standing behind him. Jerry responded with a flawless one-toed spin, the other leg swinging out with perfect posture to fake-kick Raz in the gut. Raz laughed a little, smiling at him, and for the first time, Jerry smiled a little back.

"If you two are quite done _showing off_," Lili said pointedly, and they both stepped back in closer to her, ready to listen to what really was mostly her plan.

"Okay, I figure it'll go like this. I'll hold the logs in place from this side of the river for the two of you to cross over. Once Raz makes it across, he'll keep the logs in place as I cross, since my powers will stop working once I'm out too far over the water. Then we go find this freaking elephant and get out of here."

"Agreed," said Raz and Jerry together. Raz gave Jerry a look.

"I'm not a weasel," he said again, with a little more conviction. "I want out."

"All right, let's do this."

Lili lined the three logs they'd collected up end-to-end and slowly, as steadily as possible, drifted them out to about eight inches above the water, stretching just barely to the other side. Once Raz was sure she had them locked into place, he mounted the first one with a quick neat jump and began the precarious path to the other side. It wobbled and dipped a little when he crossed from the first log to the second, and a little more between the second and the third, but before Raz really knew it he'd made it to the opposite shore. It wasn't going to be so bad after all.

He turned back to what was now the far bank and pressed his fingers loosely to his temple, reinforcing Lili's telekinesis with his own as Jerry began to make the trek. He was no less stable than Raz in terms of physical balance, but he didn't have any sort of psychic presence to back him up, and Raz didn't want to risk it. He was getting _everyone_ out of this. It wasn't long before Jerry touched down on Raz's side.

The last part was going to be the trickiest, and if Raz were honest with himself, he was already getting nervous about it. Across the water, Lili levitated herself up onto the first of the logs, and as soon as she took her first shaky step out over the water Raz felt the entire weight of the makeshift bridge shift onto his psyche. Though his telekinesis wasn't quite as finely tuned as hers, he focused intently on making each log as stable as possible - especially because it quickly became apparent that Lili, unlike Jerry and himself, was not going to make quick work of the hovering bridge.

She shuffled forward about a foot with a precarious wobble. The slight current of air caused by the rapid rushing of the water below her was making the skirt of her floppy dress ruffle and catch around her legs, and Raz vaguely "heard" her thinking about reaching down and hiking it up, but she decided against any extra movement in an effort to maintain her balance. It was in that moment that Raz began to realize that they had been wrong in worrying about Jerry the most. It wasn't the person with no telekinesis that was going to be the riskiest. It was the person with no professional balance training.

As she edged closer and closer to the second log, Raz made another, even more frightening realization: with her injured arm constantly being favored and restrained, she was going to end up terribly lopsided.

"She's not going to make it," he breathed, almost as if he knew it for a horrible unchanging fact. Not at this rate.

"What?" Jerry asked, not having heard him.

"There's no way she's going to be able to get across like this," Raz repeated, the terror beginning to leak into his voice. The terror, and the first demented workings of a totally insane plan.

"So just - I dunno, grab _her_ with your crazy floaty powers instead of those damn logs, or something!"

He already knew that wouldn't work. "I'm not as good as she is with this," Raz told him. "I'd have to grab her _and_ the log she's standing on first so she wouldn't fall, and I know I'd drop her."

"Well damnit, you have to do _something_, doncha?"

"I do," Raz said. "Hold my backpack." As he shucked it off, he realized his voice had been much calmer than he'd expected it to be. Guess he'd already resigned himself to this crazy scheme of his. And if that didn't work...well, the end results wouldn't be any worse than if he _didn't_ try it.

Lili had reached the transition spot between the first two logs, and Raz could see her truly struggling to figure out how to make it from one to the other. Every time she had to so much as twitch her left arm for stability, he saw the pain wash over her face. She was unsteady already and growing more and more nervous about it wasn't helping her.

_Don't move,_ he thought to her.

_What?_ she thought back. _Raz, I --_

I'm about to do something really, really stupid, and it'll be better for both of us if you just _**don't move**__,_ he insisted. And in that moment, both Raz and the three floating logs began to drift steadily skyward.

"What the heck..." Jerry said faintly, but Raz just kept levitating higher and higher, taking the logs and the panicking Lili with him. In a matter of moments they had cleared the tops of the makeup brush trees in the forest.

_Raz! What are you doing, you lunatic!_

"_DON'T MOVE!_" Raz shouted aloud, and touched down on the log in front of him, sprinting across it as it began to drop from the air when the curse kicked in.

Every crazy step he took rattled through the log and knocked it slightly crooked now that there was nothing holding it up, but he just kept racing toward her - he didn't have a choice at this point. He took a flying leap across the gap to the middle log to the piercing sounds of Lili screaming, moving as fast as he could to reach out to her good arm and yank her onto his shoulders. Then he turned around and bolted on the falling brushes back to the elephant's side of the river and flung himself onto the bank at Jerry's feet just as the logs were hitting the water with a terrifying _splash_, Lili sprawled out solidly on top of him.

He rolled underneath her so they were facing each other, panting out of exhilarated fear, hearts pounding against one another with the sheer insane thrill of what they'd just managed to do. Lili looked simultaneously like she was going to cry, kiss him, or punch him in the face. To Raz's delight she chose the second option, and he reciprocated, twisting his gloved hand into her thick disheveled braid, the two of them clinging desperately to each other, completely disregarding Jerry's whoops of amazement and declarations that Raz was crazy in the background.

"You are," she murmured to him, "an _awesome_ Psychonaut."

He grinned. "Damn right I am."

Eventually, both he and Lili managed to stand upright again, Lili fussing at her arm where she must have jarred it in their landing. Raz dusted off the knees of his jeans (and his own knees through the holes that were already there) and reached back out to Jerry to retrieve his backpack.

"You are _crazy_," he said again, a faint grin of disbelief plastered on his face.

"Yeah, yeah, all in a day's work for a Psychonaut," Raz boasted, acting cool. "Now come on, we've got us an Either to find."

"Uh...not - necessarily..." said Lili, voice a bit on the small side.


	14. Unreal

(**AN:** I just wanted to take a moment to thank people for the reviews that keep coming in! I know a couple of you were excited about the elephant so I hope he delivers. Enjoy!)

**CHAPTER 13: Unreal**

It loomed in front of them, a good six feet taller than Raz - about average for its kind, but still quite imposing. Its ears flapped and its nose snuffled as it tried to make sense of the three small creatures in front of it. It was mostly pink - a darker hue than Lili's (now somewhat battered) dress, probably closer to the colors of his clairvoyance badge - but was here and there run through with thin criss-crossing lines of maroon and violet and white. Around its neck hung what looked to be a small chalkboard, on a thick rope and with a stubby piece of white chalk hanging next to it on a string, and placed just _so_ on top of its giant head was -

"Okay, can someone please explain to me why the _elephant_ is wearing a _top hat_?" said Raz, as if that were really the strangest thing about the animal standing in front of him.

In response, the Either merely reached up to the tiny hat with its trunk and tipped it to him.

"Yes, well. Hello." Raz smiled a little sheepishly. "Um, you know Jerry, and uh, I'm Raz and this is Lili. Okay buddy?"

"Is this your talking-to-elephants voice?" Lili hissed at him from behind a plastered-on smile. "'Cause it kinda sucks..."

"Working on it," he muttered, and he metaphorically mentally shook himself. He'd been training in the circus since he was six, right? One elephant - and one with higher-than-average intelligence at that - shouldn't be spooking him like this. But it _had_ managed to sneak up on him ridiculously quietly.... "Okay, Mr. Either, pal. I have a huge favor to ask you, all right?" The elephant just blinked at him, and Raz tried again, but with some psychic reiteration. "_Is there any way you could help us out_?"

The Either reached down with its trunk to grab at the chalk and scrawl out a word on the board around its neck. _Psychic._

"Yes!" said Raz. "Yes, _psychic_."

"See, I told you it could do that," said Jerry.

Raz just kept talking, with his psychic energy stretching out to resemble more of a trunk than a hand, aiding him with his gestures. "We're trying to get up the cliff. Over _there_? But we're too little. Do you think you could give us a quick _ride_?"

Its trunk smeared out the old word and wrote in instead, _string_.

Raz frowned at it. "String?"

"The rope on his neck, maybe?" Lili offered. "For us to hang onto."

"Oh yeah," he agreed. "Yes, _string_," he said to the elephant. "We can all _hang on_."

It seemed to shake its head, and tapped the board again. _String_.

"What's it talking about?" Raz asked Jerry.

"How the heck should I know?"

"Ugh, okay, fine. I don't think we're going to have a _problem_ with _string_. Can we just get to the top of the _cliff_?"

Now the elephant was writing a third word: _Clarisse._

"Mom..." Lili said softly. "Hey Raz, do you...do you think he'd take us all the way to her?"

"We need to _go to her_," Raz told the Either. "Can you _take us_ to _Clarisse_?"

The answer was intense. Raz didn't get a _verbal_ telepathic message from the elephant, really - he didn't suppose any animal short of Linda or Pokeylope could probably do that. Instead, it was a wave of frightening imagery and emotion: a pale blue vibe of skittishness, laced with a dark red line of pure fear. A tall, blond caricature of a woman, larger than even the Either himself, with something robotic or puppetlike about her movements, and thick clownlike makeup smeared all across her face. It hit his brain so hard it was like getting slapped.

"Oh god, Lili..." he whispered, and unable to put the horror into words, he just projected it from the elephant on to her. She actually gasped from the force of it.

"What are we going to _do_, Raz?" she asked when she finally recovered.

"We're going to _save her_," he answered, with as much conviction as he could muster.

At that moment, almost as if on cue, the Either knelt down - surprisingly lightly - and offered its shoulder to the three teens. And for Raz, that was all it took.

"Come on, it's showtime."

"Is anyone gonna tell me what the heck is going on?" Jerry asked him with a raised eyebrow.

"I'll...explain on the way," said Lili.

"And hey, how safe is this thing anyway? Not all of us have elephant-ridin' experience, and well, you saw what happened last time we tried to get someone to do somethin' they had no practice at."

Already halfway onto the Either's back, Lili groaned. "_Really_?" she said. "You're gonna shoot that low? For crying out loud. If you fall off the elephant, I'll catch you with my brain, okay? Now come on!"

"If it makes you feel better, you can sit up front and hang onto the rope," Raz said with a grin, patting the spot just behind the pink creature's thick neck. "Just don't knock his hat loose."

Jerry glowered at him, but eventually heaved his way onto the elephant's back, and gripped the chalkboard's rope tight in his hands. Lili sat behind him, and Raz took the rear, prepared to jump up to standing mid-ride if he had to. Sprinting across a log bridge that was plummeting from the sky without using his psychic abilities may have one thing, but Raz definitely knew how to ride an elephant.

"Okay, sir, we're ready," Raz called out to the Either. "Can you please take us to _Clarisse_ now so that we can _whoooaa!_"

Right below him, it took off, moving unlike any elephant Raz had ever ridden before. It was as though for all its enormous, elephantine size, the bright pink Either weighed nothing at all. Its footfalls barely made a sound as it loped with considerable speed in the direction of the waterfall cliff. Raz felt oddly like he was riding a giant elephant-shaped balloon.

"This ain't no ordinary elephant!" Jerry shouted, as they shot lazily past trees on one side and river on the other.

Raz almost actually laughed at him. "What was your first clue?"

They traveled steadily with their huge lightweight bounds, and soon had reached the cliffside. It was considerably steeper on this bank of the river than it was on the other side, and Raz almost began to grow worried - and that's when things _really_ got surreal.

The Either's hulking, nearly weightless mass crouched down underneath them, wriggling like a cat ready to strike, and then leapt clear into the air, in a way that no elephant before it had ever done. In no time at all it had floated to the top of the cliff, and it touched down lightly by the river's side before taking off in the direction of Clarisse again.

"What the heck is this thing _doing_?" cried Lili, hunched over and thinking as hard as she could to keep from falling off.

"I dunno, but I guess we just have to go with it!" said Raz. And really, what else could they do? The Either clearly had a plan of its own, but as long as it was taking them to their destination without getting any of them hurt, he couldn't really argue with it. They were quite literally just along for the ride.

Of course, the thought then occurred to Raz that he probably _should_ have a plan - not for the ride up there, but for what they had to do when they finally got to the end. Lili was in the middle of telling Jerry about the elephant's images - how strong was _she_, he wondered in awe - and every word she said cemented harder in Raz's head that he really didn't know what he was going to do about it. How were they going to confront Clarisse? The visions he'd gotten had been muddy and strange at best - would it even be Clarisse waiting there for them? And Jerry...he wouldn't be much good in a psychic fight, so what were they going to do with him? There were too many variables to consider. Nothing about this brain - washed so hard it was practically squeaky-clean - even made sense in the typical loopy, inside-someone's-mind sense.

"Something on your mind?" Lili called out, penetrating his thoughts as they sped past the fork in the river and on to places the two of them had yet to see.

"This _mind_," he said, and she just nodded. He didn't have to explain.

The floaty thoughts of the floaty elephant drifted back up to Raz all of the sudden, repeating that single, strange word. _String._

"What _about_ string?" Raz demanded, but the instant the words left his mouth he saw it on the horizon: a thick, ropelike strand of glistening purple stretching across their path. If they kept approaching at this rate it'd probably clothesline him! He ducked flat against the Either's back, pushing Lili and Jerry to do the same, and they just barely cleared it.

"What the heck was that?" said Jerry, rubbernecking a little to try and get a better look. By the time he'd turned back around, another one had appeared down near the ground, almost too high up for the Either to bound over. As Raz looked ahead, they seemed to be getting more and more frequent - and more and more concentrated in certain areas. It wasn't until he spotted two of them criss-crossing with one another - causing the elephant to have to practically dive through an opening - that he really realized what they were.

"_Cobwebs_!" he shouted. "Not _string_!"

"Cobwebs that thick?" said Jerry, with a nervous face. "I'd hate to see the spider that made _those_."

"He's right," said Lili. "I've never seen mental cobwebs this huge before!"

"Either way - uh, no pun intended," said Raz, "if we're gonna make it through here on something this big, we're gonna need to do some dusting!" Wedging it against Lili's back, Raz dug into his backpack and drew out his cobweb duster. It had definitely seen better days and he was probably due for an upgrade - one of those new ones with the removable cartridge instead of disposable bags, no doubt - but it had yet to fail him when he needed it. Raising up onto his knees so that he could aim over Lili's head, Raz pointed the duster at the nearest thick purple _string_ and fired. It retracted with a creak and stashed it, just in time for Raz to reach out to the next one, and the pattern continued as the Either barreled onward.

"We are gonna have so many freakin' psi cards when we get out of here - "

"Uh, Lili?"

"What?"

"I thought you were...done with camp."

A strange look passed across her face. "Oh yeah. Huh. Well now what the heck do we do with them?"

"Make a mental doily?"

After a while, though, the cobweb duster was having a harder and harder time keeping up with the thick concentration of web. Soon the elephant had to slow down in its racing, and eventually, they'd be stopped altogether for a moment while Raz cleared a path.

"We must be getting closer," said Raz. "If she's this clogged up, Galochio's done a serious number on her."

"I can't believe he would do this to her," said Lili. "Only assholes prey on the weak like that. It's worse than what Loboto did to Sheegor."

Raz smiled at her a little. "What happened to you and your mom not being all that close?"

"I can't just stand here and not care about someone that's in trouble."

"Sounds like you're thinking like a Psychonaut."

"Hey, guys?" interrupted Jerry. "Don't mean to ditch our big conspicuous friend here, but I really don't see us gettin' much further if we keep havin' to clear elephant-sized holes. Think we can make it the rest of the way on foot?"

"What do you mean, 'we'?" Raz asked, raising an eyebrow at him. "You were planning on coming with us?"

"Well, yeah," said Jerry. "Because _I've_ got an idea."

-xxx-

Lili blinked at him. "Okay, that's just weird."

"Look, I just think it'll give us an edge, okay?" said Jerry. "I wanna be useful in this fight and this is the only thing I can come up with."

"It's really not that bad," said Raz. "I mean, I don't like it, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea."

"What is it supposed to _accomplish_, anyway?"

"It's the element of surprise," Jerry said. "It never hurts to have the element of surprise on your side."

"And it's hard to get the element of surprise when you're up against a psychic opponent," Raz pointed out. "We should shake things up as much as possible."

"Listen to you! You're agreeing with him!" Lili threw up her good arm. "We don't even know what we're going to have to do in there!"

"I give up, it's not worth trying to convince her," said Jerry.

Raz smirked. "Welcome to my life. Now give me your clothes."

Jerry began to unbutton his shirt down the front, while Raz tugged his thick Psychonauts sweater off over his head. He'd already decided not to hand over the goggles - some things were sacred. When his head emerged from the bottom hem of the turtleneck, his eyes landed on Lili's - she was still looking at him, as if she weren't even aware of what he was doing.

"You know, you can turn away any time now," he said with a broad grin, and she flushed pink, gave his scrawny bare chest and arms a once-over, and then turned around to scowl in the other direction as Raz and Jerry swapped pants and shoes.

"You're lucky you look like me," Jerry said as he was squirming into Raz's boots and tugging the straps tight.

"Funny," said Raz, "I was just gonna say the same thing to you."

In each other's clothes, it really was almost impossible to tell that Raz wasn't Jerry, or vice versa. Especially having swapped sneakers for boots, Jerry was a bit taller, but the Psychonauts sweater hung loosely on his thin frame in the same way. Likewise, Raz's hair sat just about right with the goggles to hold it in place, and Jerry's baggy denim shorts were exactly his size around the waist. Gazing at their reflections in the relatively still current of the nearby river, Raz had to say he was pretty impressed with them.

"So _now_ what?" Lili asked, rolling her eyes.

Raz looked around at their environment. Their situation: trapped in the mind of a brain-washed psychic, she herself the puppet of the true evil, Kasper Galochio. Their opponent: a mysterious Clarisse-like figure on the other side of a thick network of mental cobwebs. Their weaknesses: Lili's bum arm, Jerry's non-psychic mind, and that damn Aquato curse. Their assets: a cobweb duster, a lightweight pink plaid elephant with a top hat, and, apparently, the element of surprise.

Even for a Psychonaut, this was pretty crazy.

"You should change your bandage on your arm," he said to Lili.

"I did, while you were _changing_," she sneered. "And besides, I think it's getting a little better anyway. Now that it's dried off."

"What do we do with Pinky here?" Jerry said, jerking his thumb at the Either.

The elephant wrote on its chalkboard, _String?_

"Yes, I know, _string_," said Raz. "Can you _wait here_ on this side of the _string_ for us? Who knows," he added to the other two, "we may end up needing him."

"If this is at all as..._awful_ as he made it look," said Lili, "we may need all the help we can get."

Raz took her good hand, and gave it as reassuring a squeeze as he could manage. "I'll say."

So unprepared, uncomfortable, and totally unexpecting, the young Psychonaut took his cobweb duster and fired it into the mess in front of them, clearing a pathway to their mysterious destination.


	15. Undone

(**AN:** I just want to say props to my one reviewer for getting it right. Smarty-pants. :P )

**CHAPTER 14: Undone**

Raz got them as far as the clearing.

It was not unlike the place where they'd found the Either's...stuff, a cleared-out meadowy area in the middle of the makeup-brush forest. The main difference was that up here, at a higher altitude, the trees were sparser a bit sparser, giving way to more pigmented crags jutting up out of the ground. They actually broke through the layer of cobwebs right behind one of these rocks, a shimmering deep purple, and then Raz had taken off to the left through the woods while his girlfriend and his doppelganger climbed over the outcropping to face her.

Because she was there.

Raz could see Lili and Jerry down on the ground from where he hid in the upper nooks of a mascara-tree. He wasn't so high up that they should have looked tiny, but they did, because she was just so _big_.

Her body was clothed in a much-tattered version of the blue dress she'd been wearing out in the physical world. Her limbs stuck out akimbo from underneath it, her feet hovering inches above the ground. Her face was completely pasted over with the dramatic makeup of a clown, a grotesque fake smile. Her blond hair wisped every which way - sometimes it really did look like hair, and sometimes like the yarn hair of a puppet.

Like the yarn hair of the puppet she was.

"_Psychonauts_," she wailed, her jaw bobbing up and down in a parody of speaking.

"Remove this curse, Galochio!" Lili shouted, her voice small but firm in the face of such a looming evil.

"You've brought it upon yourselves!"

"That was years and years ago!" she insisted. "Your problem was never with _us_!"

"My problem is with _all Aquatos_!" the puppet swore, and her marionette arm swung down close to the two of them, barely missing. Jerry took Lili's shoulder and half-guided, half-pushed her away from it. The puppet Clarisse bobbled a couple of steps toward them and tried again.

This time, Lili was ready for it. "_Uncurse us!_" she screamed again, and she fired back with a couple of telepathic bullets. One was a glancing blow, streaking across her face and smearing the yellow around one eye up to her hairline. The other hit her more squarely, but did no visible damage.

_What are we supposed to do here, exactly?_ Lili thought to Raz, panicked.

_If shooting her isn't working, maybe try burning her?_ he wondered.

_It'd work on Pinocchio, that's for sure,_ she thought back wryly.

_I'll help with that, too, since it's less directional._ He turned his mental attention to the monstrous Clarisse puppet in front of him, thinking as hard as he could about setting her on fire and feeling Lili's own psychic energy pushing up against his to do the same. For a split second he looked down at her - right as she was kicking Jerry in the shin for not at least pretending that his physical stance affected anything. He fell into a comical, untrained version of the pose, and Raz laughed a little, but not a whole lot.

Where are you, anyway?

Better that you not know.

Ultimately, the only thing that caught of Clarisse was her stringy hair. It burnt off in little patches, leaving her even more demented-looking. But from the glint of the firelight, Raz could see something he'd missed before: thin, shining strings tracing up from each of her extremities into the sky. The wires holding her up. Raz followed them with his eyes, tracing them back to a single manipulating hand.

Raz knew that hand. That hand haunted his nightmares, and that hand could be seen reaching out for him, grim and bony and beckoning, from every body of water he ever approached.

The pyrokinesis didn't seem to be doing anything either, though, and Clarisse swung down for them again. Lili snagged Jerry's arm and bounced them into the air, clearing the swipe.

"_Stop this!_" the marionette shouted - but rather than reaching out to try and catch them again, she conjured a thick makeup sponge out of nowhere and reached over their heads - back over the purple boulder they'd climbed - to dunk it in the river's mouth and fill it with water.

_Lili!_ Raz warned.

_I know!_

He could only watch as she and Jerry circled around the Clarisse puppet, trying to get away, but to no avail. Once her gangly arm was directly overtop of them, she squeezed the sponge out, and a deluge of water came pouring down on them. Afflicted by the curse, Lili couldn't throw up her shield, and the two of them got soaked, including Lili's injured arm.

_Lili? Lili!_ Raz called, but when she didn't respond, he knew. She was too water-logged for her powers to work any more. If she didn't dry off, neither of the two of them on the ground would be able to do anything to fend her off psychically.

"_Psychonauts..._" Clarisse sneered, creepy and condescending, and though they were running and dodging as best they could, they weren't going to avoid her this time. Not unless Raz could do something.

So Raz did something.

Before her painted-up eyes, a powderpuff bush that lay between Clarisse and her prey burst into flames. She recoiled in surprise, and Lili and Jerry huddled close to it, letting the heat dry their wet hair and clothes.

"_Psychonaut?_" she hissed, and Raz fired a bullet to the righthand side of her head.

"Yeah. Psychonaut."

She heaved toward him, swinging the bottom shreds of her dress toward the other two and not even noticing when Jerry latched on and started climbing up her. Raz bounced from his tree to an adjacent one, to a third and finally a fourth before he had cleared her far enough that he could levitate back down to Lili's side.

"How are you holding up?" he murmured.

"My arm..." she said, but she was gritting her teeth, and Raz knew she wouldn't do anything about it. He looked up at Clarisse instead, only to find Jerry standing practically on the back of her shoulder. She hadn't seen him yet.

"_Where..._" she groaned, not quite forming the question, and Raz shot her with a couple more bullets before she could complete it anyway.

"The element of surprise," he quipped to Lili.

"We're going about this wrong," she said suddenly. "We can't attack her, we have to attack the puppeteer. We have to get Galochio."

"How do we - " he clutched her to himself and threw up his shield as Clarisse's arm snatched at them again - "do that? He's just a phantom hand floating in the sky."

"We have to yank him in here," she insisted. "Make the manipulator the manipulated. Make _him_ the puppet."

"And again I say, how?"

"How do you take away control of a puppet?"

"_Cut the strings!_" Jerry shouted from on top of her, and with all the force he could muster he threw himself at the one rising from the back of her skull. She reached up, scraping at her own head, but the string held fast no matter how many times she or Jerry slammed against it.

"Cut the strings," said Lili, thoughts forming in her head. She tried shooting at it but her powers fizzled out. She was still too soggy.

Raz, meanwhile, had the answer.

"Cut the _strings_!" he shouted, and yanked his backpack from his shoulders, tossing it to the ground.

"Raz?" said Lili.

"Strings, don't you get it, _string_, just like the Either said!"

"Raz..."

"Those strings were shiny in that firelight just like a mental cobweb would be! And wouldn't it make sense? It's gotta be the same thing!" He yanked the cobweb duster out and held it up, first with his hand and then with his mind. "I just have to use my telekinesis to get this up to Jerry and he can - "

"_Raz!_" screamed Lili, and he suddenly realized that she had run several yards away from him, and that a great shadow was looming over his head. He wasn't going to look up, though. He refused. Raz had to concentrate all of his energy on floating that cobweb duster up to Jerry, because from where he was he could -

_Vwoosh._

The downpour rained over him, sending him into a powerless panic. He knew it was going to stop soon, but it still seemed like he could feel it in his eyes, his ears, his throat. He couldn't breathe.

And he lost his grip on the cobweb duster.

"No!" he shouted when he found his voice again, amidst his coughing and sputtering, as it dipped back toward the earth again. He made desperate, apologetic eye contact with Jerry - they had done what they could. Now, unless Jerry could somehow come back down to the ground, retrieve it, and make it all the way to the top of the vile marionette again in one piece, there was just simply no way.

But their eye contact was broken suddenly by the cobweb duster bobbing back into view and streaking toward Jerry like it really was on a mission.

"Lili?" Raz marveled, turning to look at her - where she had gone once again to stand by his sizzling bush, and had apparently dried off well enough to do _that_.

She smirked at him. "I'm a really good telekinetic, okay?"

Appalled, the Clarisse puppet tried once again to dislodge Jerry from her back, but he was too nimble with excitement this time. One by one, he darted around and cleared the wires from her head, her spine, and her right wrist, leaving her drooping without them. As he reached out for the left, however, he ran into a problem.

"It won't take!" he cried, firing it desperately at the string but getting no results.

"What do you mean it won't take? I just changed the bag after we made it up here!"

"I mean this must be a different kinda string or somethin'!" said Jerry. "Whatever it is, this snatcher won't snatch it!"

Raz wanted badly to levitate up there and _make_ it snatch, but his abilities were still on the fritz from the waterfall.

"Psy...cho...naut...." sputtered the puppet, and she hung limply to one side, threatening to crash down on top of them.

"Get down from there!" Lili yelled at him. "We'll figure it out down here." She turned to Raz, her voice decidedly more vicious. "Won't we?"

"I'm trying, I'm trying!" he insisted. He screwed up his eyes and fidgeted with his goggles, trying to think. "Look, she's weaker now, she's not being directly controlled, but I don't think that's all we needed to do. He can't move her around directly any more, but she still seems...blinded, you know? Like her judgment's faulty. There's no way a free woman would still be flailing around attacking innocent kids."

Jerry landed lightly beside them, giving his input. "It's like her head's all fogged up, with that foggy stuff that rolls in here sometimes."

"Like that stuff they were using outside to keep us from getting in," Lili added.

There was a pause in their conversation as Clarisse's one working arm came plummeting down toward them, attempting to swat them like insects. Lili's telekinesis whisked all of them elsewhere, to the top of another jutting rock, this one a vile yellow color.

"Ick, this color is gross," Raz commented.

"It's one of the ones up there on her face, I think," said Jerry, and he pointed, indicating her left eye where Lili had been shooting before.

"Her face..." said Lili. "...Her face!"

"What, what about her face?"

"It's that _makeup_," said Lili. "Look at how thick it's caked on there! It's obscuring the real Clarisse. I bet if we manage to wash her face off, we can get through to what's underneath." She paused, frustrated. "Ugh, but my powers don't work on water any more!"

"And until I can get dried off, my powers won't work at _all_," said Raz. "There's no way we're tossing that much water at her psychically."

"Well, we gotta distract her while we think of somethin'," said Jerry. "And she's not really after me. One of y'all is gonna have to do it. I mean, I'm willin' to help, but I've been in here for ages and she and I have left each other alone."

As if to emphasize the point, the puppet's limp hand came crashing toward them again. Raz rolled right, Jerry rolled left, and Lili bounced upward. They ended up reconvening right back at the same big purple outcropping, where the mouth of the river started spilling out.

"Who would have thought that _water_ would be the way we got out of this mess?" Lili said with a scowl.

"The irony gods?" Raz offered. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the trickling river, extending out beyond them - through the tunnel in the cobwebs he'd carved, back the way they had come.

And then he snatched the cobweb duster out of Jerry's hands and took off at a sprint.

"You get to be the distraction!"

"Wha - wai - _where are you going?_" Lili demanded.

"To get the cavalry!" he cried back.

"_What_ cavalry?"

"The one we rode in on!"

-xxx-

Raz angled the duster in every direction possible as he ran, firing at random. He thought the thing might seize up from jerking this way and that so hard, but he was beyond trying to carve a nice, subtle sneak entrance and really just wanted to clear as much as possible, tidiness be damned.

He really, really just needed the Either to be able to squeeze through.

Panting, he reached the elephant, which had been diligently standing right where they'd parked it. "Thank god you're still here."

It scratched onto the chalkboard, _Psychic?_

"_No_," Raz groaned. "I'm absolutely soaking wet and my powers aren't working. I need _your help_. Do you think you'll fit if we try to get you through _here_?" He gestured back at the tunnel he'd hollowed in the cobwebs. "It's kind of important!"

The Either tugged something down out of its top hat - a _monocle_? - and eyed the webby forest through it with a bit of trepidation. But then, quite bluntly, it replaced the monocle and lifted Raz with its trunk instead, depositing him on its back and charging off through the forest.

"Yee-haw!" Raz cried, and then realized what he'd just said. He frowned down at himself and resolved that at the next possible good moment he'd get back out of Jerry's clothes.

The elephant barreled in its floaty way down through the cobwebs and brushes, pushing them aside with its bulk when there wasn't quite enough room. It was all Raz could do to hang on to the chalkboard's rope and not go flying off. They reached the others in what seemed like no time, but slowed and stopped when both Raz and the Either started to hear Lili's voice, not shouting out in anger but speaking normally, almost..._pleadingly_.

"And I _know_ it's you under there, Mom, and I just wish there were a way for you to...to..." She was levitating midair, on the level with the puppet's smeared face, and Clarisse was actually eying her strangely, transfixed, not attacking or flailing around or wailing about _Psychonauts_. "You're not _his_, okay? You're a psychic too, I know you are, and I _know_ you can fight back against this, so why _won't_ you, damnit?"

The moment was painful; Raz felt a little bit like maybe he shouldn't be seeing this. It was so raw, something Lili had never had to deal with in what really was her entire life. And seeing her connect so closely with her mother started him thinking about his own mother - and then about his father, and his brothers and sister, and how ridiculously their two families had become intertwined and messed up on this adventure. He turned his eyes to Jerry - still perched on the purple rocks - and recalled what his grandmother had told them about _his_ parents, and tried to imagine how he'd been making it through from day to day trapped inside here for so long. It cascaded over him like a waterfall.

Meanwhile, the Either was having no such emotional turmoil, and had quietly and steadily filled up its entire trunk with water from the river next to them as if it were a fire hose. And that brought a smile back to Raz's face - because this was Clarisse's Elephant In The Room, and this _was_ her psychic powers, and _this_ was her using them to fight back.

And after all that whooshing through the air, he was feeling a little bit dryer.

_Move,_ he grinned in a psychic whisper to his girlfriend, and rather than drop back down to the ground she rocketed up into the sky, and Raz and the Either shot a thick, powerful jet of water right into the marionette's grotesque face.


	16. Uncursed!

(**AN:** Sorry about the 'talking heads' chapter here. This fic is almost up!)

**CHAPTER 15: Uncursed!**

The results were almost instantaneous. On Raz's end of things, the Either quickly began expelling not only water, but what almost could have been air - the elephant was practically deflating, and after a certain point shot away like an untied balloon, jetting back through the woods until even when he turned, Raz couldn't see it any more. It was the last act of the balloon-like creature's balloon-like life, he figured, and all that was left on the ground next to him was its top hat, its monocle, and the little chalkboard still inscribed with the word _Psychic?_ Raz picked these relics up and took them with him as he headed closer to the clearing.

Because the infinitely more important outcome of the situation, of course, was occurring on Lili's end. As the water splattered the weakened marionette in the face, the caked-on makeup began to roll off like a sludge, falling in thick glops to the ground where Jerry was standing (he quickly leapt out of its way). Bit by bit, Clarisse was washed clean - and not just her face, either. As the makeup peeled away, the rest of her seemed to shift back to normal as well: her hair mended itself and lost its yarn-like appearance, she began to shrink to the size of a regular human being, and her arms and legs regained a fluid fullness like regular human limbs - with the exception, however, of her left arm.

Lili landed at the ground by Raz's side, and Jerry rejoined them too, after making sure he was makeup free.

"Her arm," Raz murmured.

"Yeah," said Lili, and she was clutching her own left arm, wounded in about the same place.

Finally, the rest of the transformation seemed to be complete, and the last thing that changed about Clarisse was her eyes - with the last smudges of yellow and violet gone, there seemed to be a renewed cognizant clarity in them, and she snapped suddenly to attention. "What...?" she said faintly, but Raz could see it in her as the images and details of what she'd done while brainwashed came rushing back to her, and soon she was staring not confusedly off into space, but pointedly at the spot on her arm where the string was still attached.

"_Kasper!_" she roared, and in an act that startled all three of her spectators, Clarisse gripped the strand of cobweb with her good hand and _pulled_.

It wasn't enough. "Well?" she said to them.

Lili got the hint first, and ran toward her, adding her own right hand to the tugging. Snapping with realization, Raz and Jerry followed, both with two good hands.

"One, two, three, _pull_!" Lili shouted, and with the strength of four, they managed to get the better of the great slimy hand in the sky, and bring Kasper Galochio tumbling into Clarisse's psyche, just like Jerry had been sucked in however long ago.

They also managed to tug down the two psychic agents who'd been up in Kasper's mind interrogating him.

-xxx-

"Razputin!"

"_Sasha_?"

"Agent Vodello?"

"Children!"

"That Croshaw brat -"

"_Everyone!_" Clarisse shouted. "Please, I'm - I'm sure there are a lot of stories to tell, and a lot of business to take care of. Which the seven of us will all do like civilized people." She took a deep breath, and Raz could see that she was quickly approaching the territory of a panic attack. "But I would really - _really_, prefer, if...we could leave my mind, first."

"She's right," Sasha said. "This is no place to be conducting any of this."

"And you must be under a mountain of stress, poor thing," Milla said, placing her hand gently on Clarisse's left arm where the string had been attached.

"Let's get out of here," said Raz. With a look to Jerry, he added, "All of us."

He took Clarisse's other hand, and with Lili and Jerry gripping onto him, and Sasha with one hand on Milla and one hand on a furious but defeated Galochio, they all linked up to the poor woman, and she gracefully ejected every single one of them from her brain.

The four Psychonauts landed soundly back in their bodies. Jerry hit the floor a little more solidly - the entirety of him had just rejoined the conscious world. And Kasper reappeared tumbling down a ladder from the upper riggings of the gypsy caravan. Seven people on the inside was cramped, but Raz, for one, was used to it. He'd take what comfort he could find in the strange familiarity.

"First thing's first - " Raz began, but Milla cut him off abruptly.

"First thing's first, what on _Earth_ were you children doing here?" she scolded, ever the mother hen. "These are very dangerous circumstances, even for you, Razputin!"

"_Even_ for me?" he balked. "_Especially_ for me! It's my family that's been under this curse this whole damn time anyway!" He turned on Sasha, suddenly accusatory. "And how is it you even knew we were out here anyway, _Agent Vodello_?"

"Ah - that is, you see - well, first it was her Moral Compass that was missing, and - "

"You _caved_, you weenie," Lili deadpanned, obviously unimpressed.

"As soon as Sasha told me what was going on, we absolutely _had_ to come out here and make sure you were all right!"

"Look, lady, I dunno what you're on about, but it's kinda clear to see that these guys did all the hard parts before you even got here." Jerry jerked a thumb at Raz and Lili, and Raz smiled a little proudly. "I say, let 'em do what _they're_ here to do, and then you can bitch 'em out all you want."

Milla was shocked. "Such language - !"

"The boy is right, Agent Vodello," Sasha interjected. He turned to Kasper, whom Clarisse had been eying the whole time, making sure he didn't weasel away. "Release this boy and his family - "

"Including my _girlfriend_ - "

" - from whatever curse you've put him under. After that, make yourself as scarce as possible. If any branch of the Psychonauts ever so much as hears mention of your name again, I guarantee you it will be Razputin and myself who will hunt you down and personally dispose of you."

"All right, Sasha!" Lili crowed.

"You bleedin'-heart Psychonauts - "

"_Is that clear?_" Sasha said forcefully, and Kasper lost a bit of his snide demeanor, and merely nodded his head.

Then he took two steps toward Raz and Lili and smacked both of them square in the foreheads with the heels of his hand.

"_Ow_! Hey!" Raz complained, but a split second later he felt his mind reeling, his head heavy, all of it like a boat tossed around in a whirling storm. Deep in the back of his consciousness, he felt it whoosh like a broken dam down his psychic link with his father, and down the smaller one-way paths that led to Finn, and to Calliope, and to Dimitri and Adrian. His eyes rolled back in his head a little - and then as swiftly as it had begun it was over, and he was back in the caravan, shaking his head to the side a little as a trickle of water drained out of his ear.

"_Ew_," Lili said vehemently, as she experienced the same disgusting phenomenon.

"Now _git_," said Jerry with a grin, clearly enjoying Kasper's humiliation far too much.

"Abra kadabra," the podgy circusman whispered, and he turned invisible before fleeing from the caravan and off into the darkness of the woods outside.

"I don't believe I trust him," said Clarisse, gazing out after him.

"That would be because you are a rational human being," Sasha assured her. "Be quite certain that my earlier threat was not idle."

"I'll say," Raz snarled. "I can't believe you're just letting him go like that."

"What more can we do?" said Milla. "He's reversed the damage that he's done, and he seems so broken that I doubt he could do much more. I almost feel sorry for him."

"I don't," said everyone else in the caravan at once.

Milla frowned a little, overruled. When she spoke again it was to change the subject. "So, darlings, would you mind telling us exactly what kinds of horrible situations you've had to brave over the course of this ill-advised mission?"

And so they all sat down - some on the floor, some in midair, and Clarisse on the small chair at the table - and Raz and Lili began to _tell_. They told it all the way from the beginning, with the mishaps at the circus to finding Jerry's grandmother (he looked particularly anxious at these parts), on through to the detour with Sasha and the turtle (here Raz handed Milla her Moral Compass back), the spookiness of the deserted gas station and Lili's injured arm, and finally their arrival at Clarisse's location and their experiences inside her mind. They seemed to mutually realize that they should probably leave out the part about Raz ending up in Lili's brain in their sleep, though he did send her a quick smile when they reached that point chronologically, and he was pleased to see she returned it.

"Clarisse - " Lili said at the end.

"_Mom_," she insisted. "I'm no fool, I heard you say it in there." She tapped a thin finger to the side of her head. "I...I want to be Mom now, I think. I'm sure everyone has learned a lot of lessons from this mess, and...and somehow, I don't feel nearly as uncomfortable with my psychic self as I did before."

"Well we did kinda pop the elephant," said Jerry.

"What?"

"Never mind."

"I can't believe the two of you would take on something so outrageous and life-threatening by yourselves!" Milla insisted.

"Hey, this was _my_ business," said Raz. "I'm the one that was cursed. I have every right to be the one to take this on."

"He's right, you know," Sasha said softly.

"And hey, after all, when our training instructor and an evil psychopathic dentist were harvesting the brains of our fellow campers, and we were the only ones around to stop them, we did _that_, didn't we?"

"Well, yes - "

"And when a terrorist organization demanding psychic amnesty in a third-world country abducted Truman, and took him halfway across the globe to their hideout in the middle of a jungle full of _psychic wasps_, we managed _that_, didn't we?"

"We were there to help you, but yes," Milla admitted.

"Yeah," said Lili, "and when the factory that produces your favorite perfume turned out to be run by an awful corporation that not only tests on animals but has published some seriously anti-psychic propaganda - "

Sasha looked puzzled. "Come again?"

Lili paused. "I guess that was just us," she said to Milla.

"I'm a _Psychonaut_," Raz insisted. "There's a _reason_ Ford gave me this uniform - "

"Is there a reason I'm still wearin' it?" Jerry said, tugging at the turtleneck with a bit of distaste.

Lili giggled a little at that, and with the exhaustion and desperation that was getting to all of them, it caught on quick. Soon even quiet Clarisse and frustrated Milla were laughing, and when it wore off, the general feeling of tension in the caravan seemed to have dissipated a little.

"I don't know about y'all," said Jerry, "but I am so freakin' _tired_ right now. Is there any way I can just go back to my gramma and _sleep_?"

"I...I'm not sure I quite _have_ a home right now," said Clarisse. "I certainly don't want to live here any more."

Raz smiled. "You could come and stay with us," he said. "There must be an opening at the circus."

"Or at the Rocky Mountain Psychonautical Headquarters," Sasha said casually.

Lili's eyes brightened, and Clarisse looked stunned. "Are...are you sure?"

"Your display in shielding this place was quite remarkable, even if you were being manipulated at the time," he said. "And the fact that your psyche hasn't been completely shattered after all of this is beyond impressive. You could definitely be an asset to us in terms of defense and strategy."

"Th...thank you," she managed. "I'd...quite like that."

"_Goin' home_?" Jerry repeated rather pointedly.

"I'm sure we all want to go home, darling," said Milla, "but, well, if we're taking Miss - "

"Browning," said Clarisse.

" - back with us, then home for all of us is quite a ways away. I'm not sure we can really do that tonight."

But that sentence from Milla's lips sparked the gears of Raz's brain turning, and suddenly he could feel it, and he _knew_. "_I_ can do it," he said softly.

"What?"

"I can take us all home tonight!" he said. "With that teleportation thing that I did before - "

"Hold on now, Razputin, that was very experimental! It may have succeeded once, but that was only with the proper equipment, and it very clearly had some side effects." He gestured to Lili's arm, which she was still cradling a little and which probably needed a new bandage.

Clarisse stood from her chair, wringing her hands a bit. "Well...I, for one, trust this boy," she said. "After everything he's done for me - and all the things he claims to have done to get here...if he thinks he can do it, I think he probably can."

Raz stood, too, and a smile crept slowly over his face. "Yeah?"

"Yeah!" said Lili, jumping to her feet. "This is Raz we're talking about. I'd take two busted arms for putting my trust in him, especially if it means getting us all home."

"With our combined psychic efforts, it could be enough to stabilize the process more definitively," Sasha reasoned.

"No!" said Milla. "It's too dangerous!"

"Sorry, lady, but you've been outvoted," said Jerry, and he reached up for Raz's hand to yank himself to his feet. "Let's get outta this crazy town."

"Two things, first," Raz told them.

"What now?"

"One, I want my clothes back. And I'm sure you do too."

"Fair enough," said Jerry.

"And two?" said Milla, still looking cross.

"Two...we're making a pit stop."

"To do what, exactly?"

"The thing I set out to do in the first place."

-xxx-

Raz was back in his beat-up jeans and boots, with his backpack on his back and his goggles on his forehead. More importantly, he was back in his dark green Psychonauts turtleneck. It felt more than ever like being back in his own skin.

The six of them had linked hands in a circle, vaguely reminiscent to Raz, of all things, of a summer camp game about to be played. Milla had clipped her Moral Compass to her belt, and with the collective psyche of the group fueling it, it was pointing them off in the direction of some beach or island or boat somewhere - anywhere.

"I don't quite know where I'm going," Raz warned them.

"Just take it easy, Agent Aquato," said Sasha reassuringly, and it was those words - _Agent Aquato_ - that did reassure him, more than anything else.

"Focus," he said, and he focused too, and pictured it in his head.

_I'm going to my father,_ he thought. _I'm taking Lili and Jerry and Sasha and Milla and Clarisse with me. We broke this freaking curse, but Dad could be anywhere, and I need to get to him and make sure he's okay, so that's where we're going. And we're all gonna get there in one piece, because this time I totally know what I'm doing. I'm a Psychonaut._

And we're going to _**teleport**__._

And, quite suddenly, they did.

There was solid ground beneath them, reassuringly, and the wave of vertigo hit Raz squarely in the gut anyway but he didn't care. He rebounded from it much faster than last time. Sasha, Clarisse, and Jerry were less lucky. Raz heard the sound of at least one stomach being emptied onto the sand behind him. He also heard, faintly, the sounds of Lili crying, "Oh my god, Raz, my arm! It's back to normal! You must have teleported the rest of me back into place this time!" and of Milla rejoicing with her, and then complaining about sand on her boots.

_Faintly_, he heard all of it, because the first thing Raz had seen upon landing on the beach was a body off in the distance, lying limply on the ground right where the ocean met the shore, each wave splashing up over it making the tatters of its clothing drift and swirl in the tide. And zeroed in on that body, nothing else really mattered, and Raz could barely hear a thing.

"_Dad._"


	17. Unfinished

(**AN:** Sorry about the cliffhanger, I guess? Hehehe. Here's an extra-long chapter to make up for it.)

**CHAPTER 16: Unfinished**

Raz's telekinetic fist reached out and plucked his father's body from the surf, levitating him closer as he ran so that they met in the middle several yards away from the greedy water. Raz knelt down and touched his face, his clothes, the place on his chest where his lungs should have been heaving but weren't. _Dad. Dad._

Raz was starting to feel like his own lungs weren't working either, his breath coming in short desperate gasps. His father looked so broken - so _weak_, in a way that he had never seen Augustus Aquato look before. This man was a skilled pyrokinetic. This man was a top-notch contortionist and a father of five. This man had saved his life.

And this time, Raz was supposed to be saving _his_ life, and here he may have failed the most important mission in his career as a Psychonaut.

The others had taken a moment to notice what was going on but were now hovering right behind him, Lili with her newly mended arm across his back trying to calm him. "Raz - "

"_Dad_ - "

"Raz, come over here and let Milla through, she's going to do CPR."

"I - just - look at him - "

"Snap _out_ of it!" Lili cried, and extended her psychic hand for a mental slap in the face. "When Kasper lifted the curse, I felt it skip across my psychic link with you - whatever weird bridge our minds must have formed when I started functioning like an Aquato." She could still barely say that without her voice cracking. "So I know for you it must have been worse - going back to your whole family."

Raz just sputtered. "I can't - what are you - Lili - "

"So _didn't it travel down your link with your dad_?" she pressed, before his panic could derail her. And that shut Raz up. He had felt it - the current of freedom, slipping like a waterfall, down to each of his four siblings in turn...and to his father. And if that psychic link was still there -

"Oh!" yelped Milla, and she jumped up away from the sand by Gus's side, because he was doing some sputtering of his own, coughing up thick seawater into the space where she had been just moments before. Behind him, Sasha and Jerry hauled him into a seated position, and he kept heaving, not even trying to do anything else until he and Raz made fleeting eye contact across the sand, out of the top of Gus's vision.

"S--son?" he wheezed, and began climbing unsteadily to his feet even as Sasha insisted that he not move.

"_Dad_," Raz said again, his voice breaking on the one soft syllable, and before either of them knew it they were in each other's arms, oblivious to the five other people standing on the beach around them.

"You did it, Razputin!"

"Dad, I was so scared that I - "

"No need to worry, son - "

"But you're _alive_ - "

"Of course I am," said Gus, smiling. "I was in great hands the whole time."

"I...I broke the curse," Raz said lamely - like he even needed to explain that after all this. "Lili and I did all this crazy stuff - there was a treehouse, and a turtle, and - "

"I'm sure you've got quite the story to tell me, Raz. But perhaps it can wait until...a better time. Don't you have some folks to introduce me to, over here?"

"Oh. Yeah."

Raz turned to look at the people standing by him, who had helped him along his ridiculous, heart-wrenching journey. Lili, whose arm he had finally managed to put right again, giving him a look that was half-smile, half-embarrassment that her boyfriend was being so dopey. Clarisse stood soft and pale behind her, looking apologetic but truly happy. Milla was crying about their _touching reunion, oh you poor darling_, and Sasha tugged a handkerchief out of a pocket on the inside of his jacket and handed it to her, even sporting a small smile of his own. And Jerry...well, Jerry just looked bored and annoyed, but Raz hadn't come to expect anything less.

"Well, you already know Lili...."

-xxx-

"Aw, are you kiddin' me?" Jerry said, a stubborn frown resting in his eyebrows and making his face even more punchable in Raz's mind.

"Hey, if _you_ wanna try fighting for your life, nearly losing a family member, and teleporting seven people across the country _twice_ in one day, be my guest," Raz shot back.

"But you said you were gonna take me home!"

"And I am. First thing in the morning."

Jerry threw a stick of driftwood at him across the bonfire, and Raz stopped it midair and lit it, too, so that it dropped into the tall mass of flame and disappeared.

Sasha turned to Jerry matter-of-factly. "I'm sure Razputin could perform the procedure tonight...if you wouldn't mind arriving back at your grandmother's with your arms where your ears should be as a result of his fatigued mind mis-assembling your molecules at their destination."

That shut Jerry up pretty succinctly, and Lili laughed, and leaned in closer to Raz on her side of the circle.

The fire was warming all of them, and drying Gus off from his spell in the ocean. Every single one of them was exhausted, and they were taking the opportunity to rest and relax on the pleasant seashore. Raz had spent a good hour telling the story of their mission _again_, with Lili and Jerry and even Sasha interjecting relevant additions (or, more often, correcting Raz's hyperbole) here and there. Gus had been fascinated especially by the Either, which Clarisse tried to give input on at least a little - it had been in her brain, after all. But after a moment Lili had just made a retching noise at them - her mom and her boyfriend's dad? _Gross!_

"Luckily for you, miss, I'm still quite dedicated to my late wife," Gus had told her teasingly. But Raz and Lili still just exchanged a look, and shuddered.

Now the sun had set completely, and everyone was trying to figure out the best way to set up camp on the beach with what Raz assumed were their limited provisions. Leave it to Milla, of course, to have one of those Bags That Hold Everything that some women are just bound to have. Her two or three small beach towels, combined with a tarp from Gus's boat that had washed up a few hundred feet to the south, was enough to put together a tent that the seven of them squeezed tightly into - lucky for them that Lili was so small, Milla often slept levitating, and Gus could position himself in whatever way was necessary.

"Good_night_," Raz said emphatically, and for the first time since he'd accidentally wandered into Lili's mind, he crashed on the ground and slept.

When he found himself soon after wandering on the black, unmarked outskirts of someone's mental landscape, Raz's first reaction was "Oh, not _again_." He just wanted to sleep, for crying out loud! When was this unconscious astral projecting just going to give it a rest?

But somehow, he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep unless he made it to whoever this was. He started walking toward a faint glow in the distance, looking for where the mindscape actually started in full. It wasn't Sasha's brain, or Milla's - he'd spent enough grueling hours in both to recognize them fairly easily. And he didn't think he'd forget Lili's or her mother's after everything that had happened over the past few days. So that really just left Jerry, or -

Or his _father_.

Raz was surprised a little by this, and he picked up his pace, starting to make out shadowy shapes in the far-off light. Come to think of it, he'd never managed to get inside his father's head before - he'd just never had a reason, never felt the need. His dad had been inside his own mind once or twice and that had been enough. Now, there was no _way_ Raz was leaving without satisfying his curiosity. He had to know.

Slowly, the shapes in the ring of light - lit almost as though a vast, invisible streetlamp shone down on the area - turned into three distinct things: a memory vault, sprawled out on its metal stomach as though it were sleeping; a thick wooden ladder, extending infinitely upward into the sky; and his father, leaning calmly against it, almost as if he were waiting for Raz.

"Hello, son," he said.

"Um, hi," said Raz, a little sheepish. "I'm sorry I'm here without asking. This has just been...happening lately."

"It's okay, Raz. We're family. You're always welcome here - I don't have anything to hide." He smiled, and then hoisted one leg up onto a low rung of the ladder, preparing to climb. "You can follow me up, if you'd like."

Raz crossed to the ladder - it felt just like the ones from the F-Z-A Cirque Extraordinaire under his hands - and began scaling it after his father, one sturdy rung at a time.

The ladder wound up and up, and though at first he'd just been watching his dad (and not from the best angle, either), soon things cropped up on every side of him that were infinitely more fascinating. The first major platform they passed showed a small, one-room schoolhouse and its playground - all the other children were playing tag while one effortlessly crossed the monkey bars over and over again. After passing through a pinkish cloud of gypsy incense - not unlike the kind Calliope often burned in the caravan - another wide level showed itself, this one clearly the interior of a circus tent, where a young man and two smaller girls took turns tumbling and bounding across the floor for an older man who was never satisfied - _Granddad_, Raz realized suddenly, the man he'd never known. But above him, his father kept climbing, past floating blue and green figments in the shape of circus tigers and elephants, past a third smaller platform with a pretty girl working at a cotton candy stand. Raz couldn't look - he knew who that was, too.

They passed level after level of Augustus Aquato's life, and it was a little frightening to Raz, that his father was being so raw and open with him. One area was clearly all devoted to his children, and Raz spotted a flyer stuck to some pole in the middle that depicted himself - half-acrobat, half-Psychonaut. There was also a place that was full of just empty trapezes and tightropes, where presumably his dad went to mentally "practice," keeping his mind just as sharply trained as his body. But finally, the ladder twisted around so they were suddenly climbing on the opposite side and at a slight angle, and they arrived at its very top, maneuvering off onto a platform that was covered in lush, green grass, with a tall fruit-bearing tree at the back of it, and in the middle, seven small but ominous gravestones.

"Dad..." Raz breathed. The two furthest to the left read _Oswald Aquato_ and _Carlotta Sharpe-Aquato_ - his late grandfather and mother, taken before their times by Galochio's curse. But five of the graves lay mouth-open, as though ready at any moment to accept their occupants.

"Every day," said Gus, looking at the blank headstones instead of at Raz as he spoke. "Every day I feared for every one of you. No matter what you do, you can't be on your guard all the time, and sooner or later I just _knew_ that one of you...one of you..." He trailed off. "A parent should _never_ have to bury his child, Razputin. It could have been any of you, at any time."

"But not any more!" Raz said suddenly, loud enough to echo through the blackness at the platform's edge. "That stupid curse is gone, and as long as me and the Psychonauts have anything to say about it, it's never coming back!" Why was his dad being so morbid at a time like this? They had won, for crying out loud!

Gus turned to him and smiled, but it wasn't with much mirth. "Oh, kiddo. You won't really understand until you have children of your own, I suppose." He stepped closer to Raz, and put a hand on his shoulder, looking him in the eye. "I will _always_ be worried about you. And your brothers and sister too. Even without a life-threatening curse on us, we all work in dangerous professions. Especially you, Raz."

"Aww, Dad," said Raz, gazing briefly to one side and back. "I'm gonna be fine. This is...you - you don't have to worry."

"Yes I do, son," he said. "It's part of _my_ profession. As your father."

They were silent for a moment, with Raz just thinking about everything, and trying as hard as he could not to look at the awkward, unmarked headstones and their empty holes. Eventually he just joked, "But at least one of the hardest parts is over!"

Gus smiled. "The hardest part of the hardest part is over," he said. "But remember what we've got to do when we get home tomorrow."

"Oh yeah," Raz said, suddenly upset again. "I've got to kick some sibling butt, that's what."

"I have my suspicions," said Gus, "but I'm still not sure. Hopefully we get all of this sorted out as neatly and painlessly as possible."

"Better keep one of those things ready just in case," said Raz, but he instantly felt bad. "Sorry. That's not funny, is it."

"I'm glad you can joke about it, to be honest," Gus said. "No use dwelling on it any more than we have to. Now come on, I want to see you in action! It's been a while, hasn't it? You're not getting stiff on me are you?"

"No way!" said Raz. "I can still balance and flip with the best of them!" But his father was already back at the ladder, sliding smoothly down to the practice platform, and Raz was racing to catch up. They spent a long time there, swinging from trapezes and vaulting and flying off springboards, with Raz especially showing off psychically here and there. After a while, a pale blue door appeared in midair, and Raz looked at it, and then at his father.

"Go on, go on," said Gus, smiling proudly at him.

Raz gripped the nearest trapeze tightly, swung straight at the door, and let go, flying through it and into the collective unconscious.

-xxx-

Raz felt like he'd barely gotten any sleep at all when he was frantically awakened the next morning, a slim crack of pale sunlight slipping in from outside their makeshift tent.

"All right! It's morning!"

Lili was apparently faring no better. "Yeah, it's _morning_," she groaned, rolling over and burying her face in Raz's sweater to block out the light. "Like eight o'clock in the morning. Are you _serious_?"

"You said in the morning you would take me home, you psychic jerkwad," Jerry insisted, still spastically shoving at the two of them. "Come _on_, are you kiddin' me? I can't keep waitin'!"

"Razputin, what is that horrible noise?" grumbled Sasha, who was clearly not a morning person. Everyone else was sleeping soundly - Milla could sleep through anything, if Raz remembered correctly, and he could hear his dad snoring - but Sasha was lying closest to where Jerry had been, and he was being hit with it almost as much as Raz and Lili were.

"Just a whiny baby who doesn't know how to sleep all the way through the night yet," Raz told him, and Jerry scowled.

"Hey, both of _y'all_ get to reunite with your folks and I gotta wait? How in the heck is _that_ fair?"

And unfortunately, that was exactly what Jerry needed to say to really get to Raz. After that whole strange experience with his father last night, Raz was really starting to understand that there was no way a child worrying about his parents - or his grandparents, or his girlfriend - was ever as serious as a parent worrying about his child.

"All right, get up."

"_What_?" said Lili. "Not you too?"

"Hey, you don't have to come if you don't want to, I guess, but I personally wanna say hi to Mrs. Croshaw again," he said. Turning to Jerry, he added, "I'm doing this for her, by the way. Not for your stupid ass."

"I guess I'll go," Lili whined. "I _guess_."

"We'll be back before you know it, Sasha," Raz said, and Sasha responded, but it wasn't really with actual words.

He didn't even bother to stand all the way up - he just tugged Lili in close to himself, grabbed the impatient Jerry at the wrist, and _thought_ his way back to Jeremiah Fields.

They landed rather harshly on the ground at the base of her treehouse. Raz and Lili were finally starting to get used to this whole _teleporting_ thing, but Jerry was not, and if he'd had anything in his stomach to lose he would have lost it on the thick grass at their feet. But as soon as he could right himself he was scrambling up the rope ladder, sneakered feet scraping frantically, desperate to get himself up to the little wooden shack.

"Gramma!" he shouted. "_Gramma_!" By the time Raz and Lili had levitated up behind him, Jerry was brushing the curtain of a door aside and bustling in.

The older woman had a spoonful of oatmeal halfway to her mouth, but it clattered back into her bowl when she laid eyes on her grandson. "_Jerry_?"

"_Gramma_," he sighed. "It's me."

"It's really you, sugar? It's not just that sweet psychic boy wearin' your face?"

"Jeremiah P. Croshaw in the flesh," he swore, and from behind him Raz gave Fannie a little wave, and thought briefly, _Jeremiah._

"Oh thank _heaven_!" she cried, and she scooped him up into her ample embrace, swinging him around so that his long legs nearly knocked her oatmeal to the floor. "You're okay, you're _alive_, baby, how in the world have you - ?"

Jerry smiled more genuinely than Raz had ever seen as he turned to them. "Well, it was mostly thanks to these guys," he said, albeit a little reluctantly.

Fannie's warm gaze fell on them. "I don't know how I could possibly thank you enough," she said, a bit slowly, putting feeling behind every word. She was already starting to tear up, her arm still clutching tightly to her grandson's waist. "There's just no way."

"Hey," said Raz, "I made a promise, and I kept it. You don't have to do anything."

"And you freed yourself of that miserable curse, too?"

"Sure did, ma'am."

"Well then just tell me this, honey - are you keeping the other promise you made me?"

Raz tugged Lili a little bit closer to his side, and smiled a little at both women. "I'm doing my best."

"Then I suppose there really is nothing else I can do." She laughed a little. "Unless you want some oatmeal!"

"I think we'll be fine," said Lili, and Raz felt the _ew, gross_ emanating from her mind, and laughed too.

"Y'all'll...come back and visit or somethin'?" Jerry said, not able to look Raz in the eye.

"Of course we will, you big bonehead," said Lili. "You don't go through crazy life-threatening stuff with people and then not stay friends, are you stupid?"

"If you guys ever wanna come down to the circus," said Raz, "I'll make sure you get in free."

"No offense," said Jerry, though he said it as if Raz were completely stupid, "but I'm pretty sure I never wanna hear the _word_ 'circus' again for a long, long time."

"I'll talk him around," said Fannie with a wink.

And so the four of them finally managed to exchange goodbyes, and then right in front of Jerry and Fannie, Raz and Lili vanished into thin air, to reappear in the sand next to their pathetic little tent. Lili crawled back inside almost immediately - she insisted on trying to get at least one more hour of sleep. But Raz saw Sasha a little ways off, smoking a morning cigarette and staring out at the ocean, and he walked to him instead, and stood and gazed beside him.

"Couldn't get back to sleep?"

"Sadly, no," said Sasha. "And there's no coffee, so..." He gestured slightly with the cigarette. "I take it the reunion went well?"

"Mrs. Croshaw was crying," said Raz. "But - in a good way."

"I suppose that's good to hear."

Raz bit his lip, and then asked his question. "Hey, Sasha?"

"Yes, Razputin?"

"I've been.... Well, a couple times lately, I've kind of accidentally sort of...astral projected in my sleep. It happened again last night, with my dad. Why...I mean, this isn't supposed to be happening, right? What's wrong with me?"

Sasha took a drag on his cigarette, and smiled. "Well, I suppose you might think of it as...psychic puberty," he said, chuckling.

"_What_? Ew." Raz made a face. "But wait, Lili's not doing it. And uh - I kind of - well this is coming a lot later than other stuff - "

"It's your mind, Razputin," said Sasha, "and yours in particular. It's perfectly normal, just...uncommon. You possess a very gifted mind - and not quite like your little friend, who is gifted with intelligence, but with psychic abilities and capacities that have far outgrown your age and your brain's physical development."

"Wait, did you just call me stupid?"

"Hardly," said Sasha. "But the long and short of it is that your _brain_ cannot yet handle your _mind_, if you understand my meaning."

"I guess so."

"And that's what causes this little anomaly. In a year or so, when your body has caught up, everything ought to even out, and your sleep-projecting will cease." He paused, and flicked some ash to the sand. "It worked out for me."

Raz started, a little. "This happened to you?"

"I see a lot of myself in you, Agent Aquato," said Sasha. "And for the most part, I mean that as a compliment. I've had quite a successful psychic career, and I have no doubt that you will accomplish something similar. But fortunately for you, you have Miss Zanotto...so perhaps you won't end up a cynical chain-smoker."

"But now you've got Agent Vodello, right?" said Raz, smirking.

"Believe me, Razputin, she is trying her hardest," said Sasha. "Perhaps one of these days she will succeed."

They smiled at each other, and Sasha dropped his spent cigarette to the sand and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. Together, they walked back to the tent, where it sounded as though at least one of their companions was stirring.

"Hey," said Raz as an afterthought, "does that mean I get to be in True Psychic Tales?"

Sasha just chuckled again. But at least it wasn't a no.


	18. Unbroken

**CHAPTER 17: Unbroken**

Back at their tent, everyone was at least stirring. (Or in Lili's case, pointedly trying _not_ to stir.) The one among them who was the most awake was Clarisse, tugging down and re-braiding her hair in an effort to look slightly less unkempt - though as miserable as they all looked by now, it wasn't quite worth it.

She finished up with her hair as quickly as possible when she saw them approaching. "Oh, there you are. But what happened to...the boy?"

"I took him home so he'd stop _whining_," said Raz.

"Oh...I see," Clarisse said softly. "Well. I...I would have liked to apologize to him again, one-on-one, but..."

Raz smiled. "I'm sure we'll be seeing him again."

Milla emerged next - looking, unlike everyone else, completely flawless as usual. Did she keep a _shower_ in that chasm of a purse? "Oh my," she said, "it's amazing what a good night's sleep does to re-energize the mind, don't you think? Everyone is just raring to go, yes?"

"_No_," moaned Lili's voice from inside the tent.

"Come on," Raz teased, smiling at Milla and Clarisse. "At camp you always get up early!"

"At camp Oleander and that damn loudspeaker don't give me a choice," she grumbled. "But I guess you guys aren't really giving me a choice either."

"_Up and at 'em_, Miss Zanotto," said Sasha, parroting back some of Morceau's more irritating, repetitive announcements. Milla and Raz laughed, in on the joke. Lili didn't think it was very funny, but together with Raz's father, she crawled from the tent a moment or so later.

"I suppose we really are all going home now," Gus said. Raz nodded firmly.

"I'm going to take Sasha, Milla and Lili back to Whispering Rock," he said.

"Miss Browning should stay there as well," Sasha instructed. "To confer a bit with Ford."

"All right then," agreed Clarisse.

"Well, then, I guess we're...only making two stops," said Raz, exchanging a look with his father. Neither one would have minded a little extra time between now and _their_ destination.

"It probably makes it easier," Gus said with a cough. "You've already done it twice today, we wouldn't want to strain you."

"I'm going to _have_ to learn to do this," said Lili. "I've got too many people to visit."

"Only so many crying airplane babies you can handle, are there?" said Raz.

"How did you - ugh."

"Hehe."

"Everyone gather close now," said Milla. "We don't want poor Razputin wasting any of his valuable mental energy."

"I could always pick up a couple of dream fluffs at the camp store."

"Let's just try to avoid that," said Sasha.

Lili and Gus stepped in close to Raz, with the other three sort of encircling them. They concentrated their mental efforts on the single notion of teleporting to Whispering Rock. It was a lot easier than the other ones so far had been - Raz pretty much knew the campgrounds inside and out, and he could envision exactly where he wanted them to land, on the trail beside the parking lot, Oleander's huge Jeep hogging two spots to itself, the lodge up in the distance....

The transition went smoothly.

The arrival...not so much.

"What the - Zanotto, is that you?" spat a raging Oleander. "Sasha - Milla - _Aquato_? Where in the Sam Hill have you all been? Truman's been on the phone with me every hour of every day tryin' to find out what's happened to his dang daughter - you mind explainin' why you just up and disappeared, Psy Cadet?"

Lili just laughed, almost genuinely. "I was visiting my boyfriend...and my _mother_," she added, tugging Clarisse closer to her. "Tell Dad to cool his jets, I'll be home any...any day now."

Raz saw the weight of what she was saying crash down into her eyes, and her mind. She turned first to her mother and hugged her close around the waist, fingers clutching into the back of her worn blue dress.

"Thanks for everything..._Mom_," she said, voice soft and slightly raw. "Let's put this back together, okay?"

Clarisse smiled, a small and honest expression, and pressed one hand against Lili's tousled hair. "I'll be right here, Liliana," she said. "Whenever you need me."

They broke apart with eyes that weren't exactly dry, and as Sasha was taking Clarisse's arm and steering her toward Oleander, with Milla following along to help explain the circumstances, Lili took the couple of steps it would take her to put her face to face with Raz.

They spent several moments in silence.

"_Damnit_," Lili said after a while.

"Yeah," said Raz. "Exactly."

They spent several more moments in silence. There was so much Raz wanted to say, and none of it would come out. His father had even done the considerate thing and stepped away a few paces, giving them privacy - but privacy to do what? Sit and stare like idiots?

If he was going to be idiotic, he might as well go all out.

"Look - " said Raz suddenly.

"I'm looking - "

" - _look_, Lili, a lot of people seem to be convinced that we're...like...well Sasha was talking about me _having you_ and Mrs. Croshaw made me make this stupid promise and Dad was making all these weird references to having children of my own and there was that thing in Pokeylope's brain that I know we kind of said we weren't going to talk about it and - "

_You are cute when you ramble,_ said Lili's mind. _Stupid-looking, but in a cute way._

"And you are _kind of an Aquato now_, and everyone just seems so convinced that you and I are gonna like, grow up and get married and have a bunch of kids and stuff."

Lili thought on this for all of two seconds. "So?"

Raz felt his face go bright red, and suddenly all the words that had been flowing out of his mouth dried up. "And - so - I - just - as long as we're on the same page, then."

"Yeah." She rolled her eyes, then narrowed them a little, and zeroed in on his rambling, _idiot_ mouth. And kissed it. A lot. She may or may not have ended up with at least one hand in a back pocket of his battered jeans, while his eventually found their way to the small of her back and the back of her neck, holding her up against himself, and desperately trying to forget that in a few all-too-short moments he was going to have to let go.

_I...I love you,_ his mind said, while his mouth was otherwise occupied.

_Duh,_ she responded.

When they managed to peel themselves apart Raz coughed a little, sheepishly, to get his dad's attention again. They really were going to have to leave now, even though the thought of going away from Lili to instead put himself in the miserable situation he was about to confront was almost physically painful. She was scratching at her arm, where he'd put her back together again, and looking down at the asphalt of the parking lot.

"You know," he said finally, "I'll always be here for you too."

"I know," she said, and before it got to the point where neither one of them could take it any more, she turned and scurried back off toward the main camp.

Raz took his father's hand and prepared himself to make their final teleportation, adding just before he vanished, "_Liliana_."

And hearing just before he vanished, "If you _ever_ call me that again I will _punch you in the face_!"

-xxx-

"I think I'd like to go in first," said Gus.

The two of them were finally, finally after all this time, standing in the dirt in front of the Aquato family caravan. In four steps, either one of them could be standing inside, where the clatter of pans and the waft of smoke told them that Finn was making them all breakfast, and that Dimitri and Adrian were complaining, and Calliope was scolding them. Getting along as well as any other family. As if nothing were going wrong.

Raz studied his father's expression. He didn't look terribly angry - but there was a twinge of hurt, of disappointment, and Raz knew that whichever of his siblings had done this, he would forgive them, but he would never forget. Raz himself was still trying to work on that forgiveness part.

And so, in four steps, Augustus Aquato entered his own home, and in three steps Raz hovered at the doorway to watch the situation unfold.

"_Dad_!" Adrian cried first, with Dimitri following shortly after, bounding across the tiny space to cling to him. Finn, who'd been facing away, nearly dropped breakfast across the floor when the realization hit him, and he too crossed to him, almost as though he were seeing a ghost - but a ghost he'd wanted to see for a very long time. Calliope was the last to react, her eyes beginning to water as she just sat frozen in place, murmuring "Daddy. Daddy."

Then Raz poked his head in. "Hi guys."

"Oh my god, kid!" Finn reached around to clap a broad, solid hand on Raz's back, nearly knocking him over. The twins were so excited they didn't know which way to turn, trying to rejoice about their dad and their baby brother at the same time. And Calliope's teary eyes widened a little in shock, and she started cooing about how undeniably _happy_ she was, but on the tiny wooden table in front of her, her previously slack hand tensed ever-so-slightly into a curled fist.

And Raz knew.

He shot a glance at his father - easier said than done, around the spastic Dimitri and Adrian - and when their eyes met, they didn't even need telepathy. Gus had seen it too.

"Settle down, settle _down_, boys," Gus insisted, herding them back into the caravan.

"But we thought you were _dead_," said Finn. Despite all of the twins theatrics, he looked the most genuinely amazed and relieved.

"I know, I know," said Gus. "Heck, for a moment I thought I was dead myself!" But his laughter at his own joke didn't last very long, and he turned his eyes to Calliope - into whose skull Raz's eyes were already boring holes.

"So why don't you boys ask your sister why she did it."

-xxx-

She had the gall to look appalled.

"Why I did _what_?" she stammered. "I didn't do anything!"

"The jig is up, Cal," Raz snarled. He couldn't believe her.

"There's no jig!" Calliope insisted. "Daddy, please. You know I would never. I would never do anything to hurt you and Razputin."

"Huh?" said Adrian.

"Dad _and_ Raz?" said Dimitri.

"I _repeat_," said Raz, as Calliope's soft hand reached up to cover her traitorous mouth: "the _jig_ is _up_."

She was still crying, in earnest now, and Raz could feel the lies and illusions and desperate thoughts swirling around and around inside her head. One particular thought jumped out at him - and suddenly, everything became clear.

"You knew," he said. "You knew I would go after Dad. You knew Dad would _ask_ me to go after him."

"Does someone want to tell me what's going on?" Finn asked meekly.

In as few words as possible, Gus narrated to his other three sons the contents of his letter to Raz - the man who'd stolen his formula ("Which, I might add, I retrieved in full"), the dangerous path at sea he'd had to take despite Galochio's curse, his plea to Raz to break the curse and ease his journey, and the revelation that the curse had now been broken (sending them all back into rejoicing for a split-second or so). At this last bit of info, Calliope started crying even more, and through her tears she finally found her voice.

"That's _all I wanted_!" she swore. "That's all I wanted for us!"

"Come again?" Gus said softly. Raz was amazed - his dad was never accusatory, never angry, just desperately trying to understand. If it had been one of his brothers - anyone but Calliope - Raz would have socked him one.

"I just...the curse," she hissed. "It all came from stupid _psychic_ stuff. It was a _psychic_ feud and a _psychic_ block and the only damn _psychics_ in the family were the two of _you_!"

Raz's jaw dropped open, then immediately clenched again in fury. "So let me get this straight," he said. "The reason you went after me and Dad - your _own father_ - was because you thought that getting rid of the psychics in the family would get rid of the family curse?"

"It's all I wanted," she repeated again, sounding absolutely miserable - but Raz didn't care any more.

"Did you ever stop and think that maybe the _psychics_ in the family were the people that were most well-equipped to remove the curse from _everyone_ in the first place?"

"Why don't you tell me!" she snapped. "You can _read my mind_, can't you?"

Raz couldn't take it any more. He ran from the caravan and just kept running. How had he lived so long with her? How had his _father_ lived so long with her? He couldn't believe that his own sister - gorgeous, kind, talented Calliope Aquato - had been harboring within her so long such a deep and paranoid hatred of psychics. All the ways in which he used to think of his dad as a psychic-hater, which his dad shot down magnificently - when in reality, he had just been a generation off! How long had she thought this way? How much of the curse did she blame on Raz and his father?

He was crying a little himself now, he realized, and he stopped running when he reached the edge of the circus's big top tent, just collapsing down next to its brightly-colored wall and stewing. How could she. How _could_ she. It was there that his dad found him almost an hour later, when the morning bustle of the circus had really gotten underway, and it was easy to lose one fourteen-year-old boy in the midst.

"Razputin," Gus said softly, crouching down next to him.

"What did you do to her," Raz hissed.

"I didn't do anything _to_ her," said Gus. "We had a long talk, all four of your siblings and me. It seems I've gone far too long letting them get by with just the barest minimum of knowledge about psychics like us. They really should have been told more."

"And now that she knows more I bet she hates us even more, doesn't she."

"Razputin, your sister doesn't hate us."

"She tried to get us killed!"

"She's scared, Raz." He seated himself in the circus mud and put a comforting arm around Raz's shoulders. "She was scared of what the curse might do to her and her own children, and she's scared of things that she doesn't understand. Lots of people are scared of things they don't understand." He smiled a little. "I told her that we might introduce her to our friend Miss Browning sometime."

Raz picked at his boots a little. "I guess that might help."

"Psychics and non-psychics will never reach total and complete understanding," said Gus. "The most we can do is just stop thinking about ourselves as psychics and non-psychics, and just start treating everyone like _human beings_. It's what we all are, after all."

Raz thought about that - about _human beings_. He and his family were all human beings, even if they risked their lives for a living - even if they hated each other sometimes. Lili and Sasha and Milla were human, even if they possessed extraordinary psychic skill that most other people didn't. Jerry Croshaw was a human being, even if Raz wanted to punch him in the face. Even Kasper Galochio, slimy as he was, was human, and though Raz never quite understood his motives he must have had them...just as Calliope had had hers.

"So...you're not mad at her?" he said finally.

"Oh, far from it, I am _very_ upset at her appalling behavior," said Gus. He stood up, and extended an arm to help Raz to his own feet. "But I'm also a little upset at you, kiddo, for reacting so strongly. You've got a nasty habit of doing that, you know."

"I'm sorry, Dad," he said. "For...everything."

"Lucky for you, you've done quite enough lately to make up for it."

"So now what do we do?"

"Now, I think you ought to loan me that psycho-portal of yours," Gus said with a smile. "I'm going to let the four of them in and show them around a bit."

Raz grinned. "That's a _great_ idea!"

"Like I said before - I've got nothing to hide."

They walked back to the caravan, both of them finally smiling again. Almost suddenly, it didn't really matter to Raz _how_ everything had happened. It just mattered _that_ it happened - that he'd had these experiences, and that they were _his_, to treasure inside himself and share with his family, psychic and non-psychic alike. He envisioned his father's mind, all his good times and bad stacked one on top of the other, and Raz imagined that somewhere in his own mind, he was sort of doing the same, with everything that had happened over the past three days. He'd forged new friendships and strengthened old ones. He'd gained new skills, and overcome his one crippling weakness. He'd saved his dad, his girlfriend, and a couple of wonderful innocent people along the way. He'd _broken the curse_, instead of letting the curse - and all the craziness that had come along with it - break _him_.

And those _three days_ meant it was Monday, he realized suddenly, and he was insanely late for work.

-xxx-

In the tiny Rocky Mountain Psychonautical Headquarters facility - wedged into a crack of the world somewhere, within a day's levitation of Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp but still a bit tricky to find if you weren't one hundred percent sure of what you were looking for - a typical afternoon went by rather slowly. You might find Howie Greissmeyer skulking around trying to get his job back, but everyone knew that wasn't going to happen. You wouldn't be surprised to see that Noreen Pate was texting cryptic one-word messages to an out-of-region number, or that Reggie Doom was trying to cleverly hide a porno download behind a letter he was composing to his sister. But inevitably, if the day were moving slowly, one employee would still be working diligently, never bored with her work. Her fine blond hair would slip over her shoulder as she hunched into her computer, tracking the whereabouts of known psychic terrorists here or monitoring that strange Either phenomenon there. Even though it was a grueling job, there was always a small smile on her face.

Meanwhile, the two other cubicles would be empty.

_Are you __**sure**__ there's not some other kind of work we should be doing?_ Raz thought to Lili as she slipped her tongue past his lips, pressing him into the wall of the pitch-black supply closet.

_Nope,_ she insisted. _Nothing._ She grinned into the kiss. _And since when do we follow the rules anyway?_

Pushing back against her, Raz had to agree. Friday afternoons got like this a lot, after all. And when Friday afternoons got like this, Lili usually got...like _this_. And that was hard to complain about.

It was very _easy_ to complain about his cell phone ringing in the middle of their..._work_.

Lili's lips lifted from his, and pouted. "Really? Now?"

"It's my dad," said Raz. "I've gotta take it." The light from the screen of his phone illuminated the dark closet harshly, making Lili's eyes squint up, and he tried not to sound too love-drunk as he answered. "Hello? Oh wow, yeah, sure. No, of course I'll tell them. And maybe I'll finally get Jerry to come, too, it's been a while since I've seen him. ...Haha, yeah. Guess we can finally joke about it." His eyes flicked to Lili in the near-darkness, and she apparently took that as a sign that it was okay to start kissing him just below the ear. "Okay, well, I'm a bit - uhhhhhhh _busy_, right now, Dad, but I'll, ah, see you later, definitely. Okay! Bye!" He hung up quickly, and turned back toward Lili, kissing her in earnest now, tugging her toward himself, all of him smiling.

_Lemme guess,_ she thought at him, noticing his sudden change in attitude.

_Yep,_ Raz thought back. _The circus is in town._

-xxx-

(**AN:** Well, guys, this is the end. I actually almost cried writing this chapter – while most of me is excited to share the end with the world and watch it come full circle, part of me is so incredibly sad to see it go! I really hope everyone has enjoyed this as much as I have, and I'm glad that I've been able to tell this story and share it. Thanks everyone for your support. And if you stick around, you never know when I might write more Psychonauts in the future!)


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